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by bjornasm 1086 days ago
One option would be to do testing with screen-readers and then find out if the content works, and if not find out why.
1 comments

I think most people are fine with the idea that some of the costs (monetary and otherwise) arising from disabilities should be transferred from the people suffering from them to society at large. But I don't think it's reasonable for producers and users of broken screen readers to expect everyone (including authors of private blogs posts) bending over backwards to accommodate them, nor is it a remotely efficient use of societal resources. It also creates completely perverse incentives.
If there is a bug in the screen reader then that's on the vendor.

However the overwhelming number of cases where a website is unusable with a screen reader are due to lack of proper semantic tagging, like alt text and so on. The last thing a screenreader user wants to hear on a site is "button," "button," "button..." There's certainly room for tooling to help though. I definitely think it sucks that many accessibility linters are nonfree and thus will never be used by site devs who aren't worth suing.

It's worth remembering that accessibility helps everyone, not just the disabled. In fact one of the more popular arguments against accessibility is that it allows non-disabled persons to do more than intended.

So while there's a good argument to be made for being charitable to those with a frankly really lousy condition, if you just want to be self-centered you still benefit from properly tagged data.

Did you even bother looking at the website source before writing this?
What part of if there’s a bug in the screen reader it’s on the vendor did you fail to understand?