do you have any tips or guidelines for writing in a way that's screen reader accesible? like what kinds of things are hard for a screen reader to read? i normally type in all lowercase with no apostrophes and a lot of acronyms and i'm considering changing that if it makes my stuff more accessible. thank you!
If you want to be one thousand percent sure that what you’re writing is accessible, a good strategy is to pretend you’re sending an email to your superior and adjust your spelling and punctuation (not the actual text content) to fit that, but most coherent plain text that doesn’t have typos is screen reader accessible. If you’re really dedicated, most devices have built in screen reader/text to speech functions if you want to test it out.
I’ve never ran into trouble with text that’s all lowercase, but a lack of proper punctuation can mess up the pronunciation of a word/phrase or make the sentence confusing. Forgetting a period is fine but it’s important to include apostrophes and dashes where they’re needed.
Some popular acronyms get read by screen readers properly or don’t need any context like LOL or LMAO but the vast majority of them sound like gibberish to anyone using a screen reader. When I need to use an acronym for something, I will type out the full phrase next to the first appearance of the acronym so its future use has context. For example if I’m writing a post about Cerebral Visual Impairment or CVI, I will type the full term and then refer to it as just CVI for the rest of the text. I hope this helps!
Note: I only have experience with TalkBack and NVDA so if people who use other programs want to chime in about what breaks their readers, go ahead!
Going to tag on to this that if you use scene breaks, stick to the traditional three marks (*** or — are good; dashes preferred because they’re very short for a screenreader to read). There is nothing worse than having a screen reader take that deep breath of processing-an-overlong-sentence and then launch into fifty-two consecutive DASH DASH DASH DASH DASHes because an author decided to try and cover an entire extra-width monitor screen with their scene break marks. Have mercy, please.
Edit: OH! OH! I REMEMBERED THE OTHER THING! Please don’t put spaces between letters for aesthetics (like typing A E S T H E T I C S). That is… very hard to parse with my ears, especially for long words/sentences.
Also: zalgo text is visually hilarious when used well but generally not handled gracefully by my screen reader, so please oh please compromise by putting a plain text translation right next to it? (Please DON’T put it as a footnote. I don’t want to go the whole chapter not knowing what was said.) That font can be hard to parse even with human-eyes, so your other readers will appreciate it, too.
(By zalgo text I mean things like t̶͙̮̽̆̍̓̓̍̓̃̏͌͂͐̒̑͗̅͑̿̿̉̇̈́̄̃̊͘̕͜͝͠͠ȟ̸̢͓̟͇͈͉̣̺͓̜̬̝̝͇̖̤̲̠̠͈͉͖͚͙̭̮̣̈́̀̒̒̄̽̅̓́̔̚̚͝͝i̷̟͉̹̜̠͈̘̠͇̤̪̹͈͖̦̠̤͆̾̔͑̈́͌͗̏͗̓̈́͆̃̅͐̿̏́̑̉̋̓̚͘̕͠͠ṣ̸̡̛̳̰̰̝̖͕̳̙̩̯̾̈́̌͛͗̋̐͜͜͝)