Usability of D for Visually Impaired Users

[Chris via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 5 September 2016 at 05:20:28 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 9/4/2016 5:15 PM, w0rp wrote:
>> A noble goal. The trick is probably all in careful use of 
>> markup. alt tags, aria
>> text, tab ordering. You can probably test various pages on the 
>> site by listening
>> to the output of screen readers.
>
> The thing is, I have no idea how experienced screen reader 
> programmers do things. So we kinda need their help, rather than 
> us naively trying a reader. If I was building a race car, I 
> wouldn't ask a newbie driver to give me feedback on how it 
> handles!

I second wOrp. While it is true that a person with normal sight 
has no way of knowing how screen readers are used (believe me 
it's pretty impressive), I know from my experience with working 
with visually impaired people that the best thing is a proper, 
clean and simple markup and _no_ fancy stuff like Flash, heavy 
use of JS and the like. Most screen reading software can parse 
and handle HTML very well. So the first priority is proper 
markup. Then one can fix the few glitches left with the help of 
the `aria-label` property.

A blind user I worked with used D for a term paper and he could 
find his way around on dlang.org. So it seems to be pretty ok 
already. We should only be careful with new stuff like language 
tours and tutorials. They should all be marked up properly and 
have no buttons or links that are invisible to screen readers.