Accessibility best practices for screenreader testing

Things accessibility/product owners should be doing to decide what screen readers to test and how to test them.

Chart from WebAIM survey #8 https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey8/

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Chart description: The results of the annual WebAIM survey from 2019 shows the trendlines for Voiceover, NVDA, and JAWS as a primary screen reader from 2009 to 2019

• JAWS started at 64 % in 2009 and has dropped steadily to just above 40 % today.
• NVDA started in the low single digits in 2009 and just passed JAWS at 40.6% last fall when this survey was performed.
• VoiceOver market share very slightly increased over the past five years.

Screen readers are the form of assistive technology that takes visual screens from software, websites, mobile applications, or documents and converts them into audio output that people with vision loss can perceive, operate, and understand.

There are many different screen reader providers. I am deliberately avoiding the use of the word “vendor” here since most are free. Each screen reader has an entirely different set of gestures and keyboard commands that can be used by the user to enable interaction. And there are a lot of screen readers on the market; plus or minus about 40 altogether, though three of them hold 90 % of the market. Since there will NEVER be enough time to test them all, what are the best practices for deciding which one(s) to use?

Best Practice #1: Test at least one screen reader per OS supported by your product

• If you officially support Linux, you have to test Orca even though it only has .6 % of the overall market because it is the most common screen reader for the Linux platform.
• If you officially support Apple, you must test using VoiceOver.