Assistive tech (semi-) poll

[denise]

One of the problems we've been running into lately when talking accessibility-focused design is that it's very hard to know what assistive/adaptive tech people are using to access the site. Sometimes this information shows up in the Google Analytics aggregate data that we look at for information on browser capabilities, but it's hard to get an accurate picture that way: a lot of adaptive tech self-reports as something other than it is in order to "trick" websites that do browser-specific design into giving it different results, etc.

So, in order to a) make sure we're testing things in the most commonly-used assistive technology setups out there and b) make sure we're making the right design choices in the future (especially as there are multiple conflicting accessibility-related paradigms), we would like to get a better picture of what kinds of assistive technology our users are actually using to access the site.

Rather than trying to make a poll and listing off various forms of assistive tech (and invariably forgetting half of them), let's run this as an open-ended semi-poll. If you use any kind of assistive technology (screenreader, text-to-speech software, dictation software, screen magnifying software, browser extensions or plugins that change the way web pages display to you -- anything at all), please comment to this post listing off all the things you use. (And, if it's software, include the version number as well, if you can find it -- there are major differences in how different versions of some programs work.)

For "assistive technology", we're taking a very, very broad definition -- anything from "JAWS, version 13" (screenreader software) to "Dragon NaturallySpeaking" (dictation software) to "NoSquint" (Firefox extension) and anything in between. If you use it to help you make the web more accessible for you, we want to know about it, no matter how minor you may feel it is. (And even if your particular assistive technology has been mentioned already, mention it again; we'd rather have something reported multiple times than risk missing it!)

For those who feel uncomfortable talking about this publicly, anonymous commenting is enabled in this community (with the antispam test temporarily disabled) and all anonymous comments will be screened on this particular entry, so if you comment anonymously, it won't be public. We don't need to know who uses what particular setups, we just need to know what setups are being used, if that makes sense!

Comments

[jeshyr]

I think our biggest lesson from this is that people's accessibility solutions are more complex, more complicated, more personalised, and more wide-ranging than the "standard" stuff says.

Firstly we have people using things like AdBlock and F.Lux for accessibility reasons - something they're almost never advertised for. Most people don't think of these as accessibility solutions at all really, just as convenience things.

Secondly we have almost every single person in this entire thread using more than one solution - several people have listed more than five things they use at the same time.

Thirdly we have a bunch of people saying they're using very personalised solutions like bookmarklets, GreaseMonkey, Stylish, and changing their browser defaults to suit themselves. This is great!! But it's also something that isn't really thought of as "standard" accessibility stuff I suspect.

I'd love to see this thread distilled and written up for something like WebAIM to show how wide-ranging and complex real world accessibility setups are!