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Screen Reader Tests

Last updated: October 25, 2008

This section of tests provides some insight into how screen readers handle various aspects of the Web. Currently, these tests mainly focus on pronunciation, highlighting common problem phrases (such as “homepage”) and constructs (such as dates).

Important: These screen reader tests are undertaken with default preference settings and text-to-speech engines.

These tests are ongoing and continually being expanded upon. If you find any of the information useful, or if you find anything to be incomplete or inaccurate, please let me know.

Alphabetical List of Tests

1. Abbreviations (and screen reader support for CSS2 Aural Style Sheets / CSS3 Speech Module)
2. HTML character entities and numeric character references
3. Dates and time
4. The iframe element
5. Microformats in screen readers
   1. datetime-design-pattern
6. Semantic markup for poetry
7. Pronunciation (words and phrases)
   1. Pronunciation of “cliche”
   2. Pronunciation of “content” in various contexts
   3. Pronunciation of “e-mail”, other “e” prefixed words and variations
   4. Pronunciation of “home page” and variations
   5. Pronunciation of “read”
   6. Pronunciation of “site map” and variations
8. The q element
9. Screen reader handling of required field indicators

Related Notes

• Aural CSS: Support for CSS2 Aural Style Sheets / CSS3 Speech Module
• Screen Reader Quirks
• All screen reader notes…

Useful Links

• WebAIM: Testing with Screen Readers
• WebAIM: Screen Readers on Mac (JAWS, Window Eyes, Parallels, and Boot Camp)

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