Blind and Visually Impaired Community
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Android screen reader for web browsing (self.Blind)
submitted by BleedingEarsMurphy
I'm in the process of developing a website that I want to make as accessible as I can. Throughout the process, I've been using NVDA to test this. It's free, and it runs on my development machine.
Today I tried browsing the site using Android and its built-in "TalkBack" screen reader. I was disappointed to find that my site really didn't work well at all with TalkBack.
However, I visited a couple .gov sites (which really should be accessible), and I noted that they exhibited many of the same issues as my site- reading non-visible content to me, announcing buttons but doing nothing when I double-tapped, tabbing through controls in an order I perceive as strange, etc.
So, I'm wondering whether TalkBack is really useful for web browsing. It seems pretty well-suited to just navigating around Android, but doesn't seem to work well with even relatively simple sites.
Can anyone confirm / refute this? Anyone have an example of a site that works well with TalkBack? Is Apple's screen reader just much, much better?
Thank you all!
Today I tried browsing the site using Android and its built-in "TalkBack" screen reader. I was disappointed to find that my site really didn't work well at all with TalkBack.
However, I visited a couple .gov sites (which really should be accessible), and I noted that they exhibited many of the same issues as my site- reading non-visible content to me, announcing buttons but doing nothing when I double-tapped, tabbing through controls in an order I perceive as strange, etc.
So, I'm wondering whether TalkBack is really useful for web browsing. It seems pretty well-suited to just navigating around Android, but doesn't seem to work well with even relatively simple sites.
Can anyone confirm / refute this? Anyone have an example of a site that works well with TalkBack? Is Apple's screen reader just much, much better?
Thank you all!
fastfinge 2 points 6y ago
Apple's screen reader is just much, much better. ChromeVox, the screen-reader built into chromebooks, is also pretty good; so Google is capable of building a decent screen reader. However, I'm not a native Android user. I just borrow friends phones for testing every once in a while; IPhones are expensive, after all, and if TalkBack would improve, I'd love to buy a cheap Android phone and save my money. I have been told, however, that if you install Firefox for Android, everything works much better than it does with the native browser. But I've never tested that myself, so I can't verify. If you have a minute or two to spare, it'd be really neat if you installed Firefox for Android, and let us know if you notice any objective difference. It could just be the placebo effect of Firefox fanboys, after all. Or perhaps the difference users notice could also be attributed to the fact that Firefox for Android allows them to install AdBlock, thus getting rid of ads and making most every day webpages easier to use.
edit to add: this link might also be useful: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-use-talkback-support-firefox
edit to add: this link might also be useful: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-use-talkback-support-firefox
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