Introduction to the Screen Reader Topes Course: Demystifying Screen Reader Use for Manual Testing

In this session we’ll prepare you to perform effective screen reader testing. Accessibility professionals all know screen reader testing is important, but the barrier to entry is fairly high: before you can test with a screen reader, you have to know how to use a screen reader. Wrapping your mind around all those keystrokes and what they do can be difficult. We’ll break it down for you, showing you as you use the free screen reader of your choice to go through our Screen Reader Ropes Course that it’s not as complicated as it might seem.

Beyond just explaining the theory, we’ll give you the chance to begin getting comfortable with the experience, and even begin developing some muscle memory for it. Make sure you bring your laptop and cellphone because you’ll be practicing plenty throughout the session.

In between rounds of practice, we’ll explore the differences between how visual web surfers get around the web, and how screen reader users do. We’ll dig deep into why, because of those differences, it’s optimal to pair native screen reader users with native visual users so both can explore what an equivalent experience would be like, and they can give balanced recommendations for remediations to site owners and others.

Finally, we'll show you how to take your testing to the next level by adding language to your reports that brings a deep understanding of the problem.. We'll teach you how to describe what an ideal interaction for a screen reader user would be for the examined components. We'll train you to explore the problematic aspects of the current experience. This will make it so that those you communicate with will gain a deep-seated sense of the inequality they've been unknowingly perpetuating. You already understand it, but helping others to get it too is a whole separate process that we'll train you in.