[mwcampbell]

I believe it's up to screen reader developers to come up with innovative ways of making the web as it currently exists more usable, rather than requiring the millions of websites out there to accommodate the technology's current limitations. In this case, perhaps screen readers need to somehow intelligently read nearby text when a control immediately receives focus on page load.

[extra88]

No. Browsers already parse the page to produce an accessibility tree that's provided through the operating system's accessibility API. Screen readers attempting to supplement what's provided through that API by re-parsing the page should be a last resort and is bound to be error-prone.

Designers and developers need to learn that what they make will be, and should be, experienced in ways different than how they do. Content is experienced linearly, not always in two dimensions, and semantics can make programmatically explicit what is only implied visually (like heading text being bigger and bolder).

The prevalence of smartphones and responsive design have helped somewhat to expand people's understanding of how using digital experiences can vary. There's a lot more that can be learned.

Aside from not using autofocus on the input field at all, another existing option is to programmatically associate the preceding block of text by giving the block a unique id and referencing it from the input using an aria-describedby attribute; after a screen reader reads the input's accessible name, it will read the associated description.