Screen Readers for Blind Users

[Ron_Bower]

I have a few Blind Users who use the JAWS Screenreader (https://www.freedomscientific.com/products/software/jaws/).

The screen reader seems to pickup what seems like random prompts for the various objects. ToolTips seem to be skipped and there is no way for them to inspect the lines in a ListBox.

Has anyone had any success finding a screen reader that works well with a Xojo Desktop application.

BTW, macOS seems to do a slightly better rendition for the prompts.

Ron Bower

[Anthony_G_Cyphers]

Some of Xojo Desktop (like the DesktopListBox) is canvas controls that draw on the screen and don’t support assistive technologies. You might be able to create your own using containers, but there’s still going to be some (mostly) insurmountable issues in Xojo-built UIs without the use of declares. The native controls, however, should mostly work, but I haven’t actually tested accessibility in Xojo UIs in a few years so I can’t give specifics.

[Ryan_Hartz]

I’m slowly making my way down this path, but for a web app, not desktop. My post from a couple months ago

Web app accessibility - How are you handling this in your web apps?

So I heard back from the analyst. I was expecting a “figure it out on your own”, but I got a surprisingly helpful response. Hopefully this will help others. We should all be doing our part to make our apps inclusive for all users. I added the following to the FR Issue as well Three things I use to test: I recommend using NVDA for testing screen reader experience. NVDA is a free screen reader, and there are some good resources for accessibility testing with it, such as WebAIM: Using NVDA …

Years ago, I altered one of my desktop apps to work for a blind student. It was quite the challenge. Basically, what I did was completely chop it up and used the System.Speak in lieu of the screen reader. I also built in keyboard pressed commands to navigate through the app and speak the text

I abandoned further updating that project as he was the only blind user I had in 20 years. If you read my forum post above, you’ll see it’s going to be more of a requirement for web apps by next year. My focus has lately been on meeting the WCAG requirements. I’ve gotten some of the basic and easy parts done. I’ve been putting off trying to get the screen reader/navigation for blind users, but I’ll be putting in more effort soon

The analyst I communicated with pointed me to NVDA for a screen reader (it’s free). I literally just downloaded it yesterday and did some basic tests to see how it works with the app as-is. There’s a lot of work to do, some of which we don’t have functionality yet in Xojo Web

Here is the NVDA site to download if you wanted to do your own testing. It works with desktop apps too. Only runs on Windows though

Download NVDA