[GreedCtrl]

As someone who's doing some accessibility programming but has no background in the field, I do have a random question to throw your way if you are game.

Our team is developing voice control for a website. This is mainly requested by sighted users who want to use the site hands-free. But we also have an accessibility mode for better screen reader support.

We think voice control might be appreciated by screen reader users too, but we aren't sure how well it would work with a screen reader.

Are there common pitfalls we should be wary of?

One thing we're worried about is that the voice from the screen reader might interfere with the detection of the user's voice.

I know general dictation and voice control software already exists, so my initial assumption that screen reader users would benefit might be wrong. If the existing tools are good enough, perhaps this whole question is moot.

[mwcampbell]

Yes, the screen reader output will probably interfere with your speech recognition. You may be able to work around that on some platforms by enabling echo cancellation when getting mic input from navigator.getUserMedia, but I don't know if that actually works on any desktop platforms.

In general, you should assume that the user already has whatever assistive technologies they need, and you don't need to provide your own, just make the content and UI accessible using semantic HTML and (if needed) ARIA. Providing your own screen reader, for example, would definitely be a mistake. The same should ideally also hold for voice control, but apparently you're actually getting some demand for that.