Video Transcripts : Screen Reader Demo (NVDA)

This video is a recording of a teams meeting and includes a screenshared screen reader demo of the Digital Media library guide and some attendee's cameras. Anaya describes what she's doing verbally. The keyboard focus can be seen for part of the video.

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Anaya: Going to demonstrate a screen reader software and how that interacts with specifically our libguides. But it should be generalizable information. The caveats for my demonstration today is I would put my expertize level with screen readers at somewhere in the medium range. You know, it's not the first time I've ever opened a screen reader, but I'm also not an expert user and I'm I'm also a sighted user. So both of those things are going to affect how my demonstration works for you today.

I'm going to be using NVDA which stands for Non-visual Desktop Access. It's a free and open source screen reader and screen readers do very slightly across different programs. So this is kind of one example of that. I'm going to fire up the screen reader in just a minute. I'm going to try not to. And I do this every single time. I need to make sure to share my computer sound as well. I'm going to try to go relatively slowly because the screen reader can be a bit overwhelming, but you'll hear the screen reader and then you'll also hear me kind of trying to explain what is sort of is going on. So that's the plan. All right.

And just to confirm everybody can hear?

NVDA: Dialog welcome to NVDA.

Anaya: great,  okay

NVDA: most command okay step stem and weekly meeting Microsoft Teams Document Meeting Controls Toolbar Home Digital Media Subject Guides at Northeastern University Mozilla Firefox Home Digital Media Subject Guides at Northeastern University links skip to main content visited link graphic new library logo breadcrumb navigation landmark list with four items visited link Northeastern University slash visited link subject guides slash visited link digital media slash home out of list search landmark digital media home heading level one.

Anaya: Okay, so you heard me. Skip over the the window That is our teams meeting. You heard me click on the the page that we're looking at and then you heard it start to read from the top of the the page. Right. So I've actually told it to go to the the header one so that it would stop talking for a minute. So there are two main ways that we will navigate a page using a screen reader. It kind of just started reading. One of the ways is using tab, and tab is going to go down the page as if it's a list navigating from each of the sort of interactive elements of it. So I'll tag tab through in a minute and you'll see that it's going to skip over plain text, but it will go it'll read through all of the navigation items because those are buttons or links. It's going to read through the links on the page, things like that.

But headers, regular text is not it's not going to read that when we use the tab button. So tab is what I'm using right now.

NVDA: Guide pages navigation landmark list with six items home visited link finding

articles link guides saw page drop down control collapsed sub menu link.

Anaya: So here I'm going to hit Enter in order to open this submenu

NVDA: expanded list with three items dissertations theses peer reviewed articles link seminal works link finding e-books link finding video visit finding data slash. Citing your sources link. List show more information about this database Button, A artsor link. Show more information about this dat- Communications and Mass Media complete EBC status to visited link.

Anaya: So now if I want to navigate through the page and have it read everything, I'm going to use my up and mostly the down arrow to say Read the next thing. And there is a shortcut that we can use to have it kind of read continuously. But right now the setting is to read. It's sort of estimating it about a sentence, but it always ends up cutting out in the middle of a sentence. So you'll see it stop. And then when it continues to read, it's because I've pressed the down arrow

NVDA: list with two items graphic data and statistics out of list. Statista is the first statistics portal in the world to integrate data on over 60,000 topics from over 18,000 sources onto a single professional platform. Statista.com provides companies, business customers, research institutions and the academic Community with direct access to quantitative data on media, business, finance, politics and a wide.

Anaya: So when it and I will say that I didn't always let it finish reading so like finding data. I asked it to go on to the next thing before I read the whole thing because it can sometimes be a little bit longer. So as you might imagine, this could take a while for somebody who's relatively new to this process to navigate a website in this way.

So there's a couple of other things that we can do with the screen reader that help to increase our sort of navigational capacity. So one of those things is I can use H to tell it to move on to the next header on the page. So right now we're under key resources.

NVDA: Scholar one search heading level two.

Anaya: And now I've jumped down to the next header. So all boxes have an H. So key resources is that is a header to scholar one search is a header to I think it's going to jump from here up to your subject Librarian Search

NVDA: scholar one search heading level three.

Anaya: Nope, I was wrong. We have a subheading here.

NVDA:  Recording studios heading level two

Anaya: and I forgot about that box.

NVDA: Your subject librarian heading level two.

Anaya: There we go. Now we can kind of see the page, right? How non sighted screen reader users get that sort of sense for a page is by I'm going to insert an F seven

NVDA: elements list dialog a new element.

Anaya: and then I have to get As it opens on a new page. So this is a list of all of the links on this page. And this is the reason why when we talk about writing links, we say do not use visible link text that says things like quick click here or more information, because in this list you don't have the context of the text around it to tell you what you're getting more information about or what click here might take you to So this is why we really want to have link text that is describing where that link is going to take you. It doesn't have to be particularly long, right? The name of the database, it's fine, but we want it to be specific to what that link is. Now we can also move over to headings,

NVDA: headings, radio, button, press, not checked alt plus

Anaya: And this and this is going to give you kind of a bird's eye view of what that page looks like, via the headings structure. And this is why it's so important for information to relate to the heading that it's under and to have a good headings structure, which we'll talk about more later as well. But this is going to give us an idea of what's on this page. So we know that it's a guide page for digital media. We know that we've got those key resources information about Scholar one search. And from here, if I know what I'm looking for, I can then jump to that point in the page. Or if I'm looking for something specific and it's not in this list, I know that maybe I need a different page. Right? So this is one of the ways that that screen reader users will navigate through complex web pages and groupings of those complex web pages.

So yeah, I am going to open one more page just to kind of get a sense for it, but that is pretty much what I wanted to show you. So exit here

NVDA: Home Digital Media Subject Guides at Northeastern University, Mozilla Firefox Home Digital Media Subject Guides at North Related Guides Heading Level two.

Anaya: If I if I hit shift and tab, I can move back up the page

NVDA: schedule of you list edit. Finding data slash to finding video of his findings. Video Digital Media Subject Guides at Northeastern University Mozilla via digital media finding video heading level one.

Anaya: So I hit enter to to click on the finding video page. We opened that up and I hit H to bring it to a heading so that it would stop talking, so that I could talk to you. And then from here I can

NVDA: guide Page's navigation landmark list with six items visited link home

Anaya: use the the down arrow to navigate

NVDA: link finding articles collapsed sub menu link guide sub page link Finding E-books Video Collection List with five items Bullet Link Academic Video Online Graphic Email Required Graphic Video Out of list Academic Video Online Premium provides video content to a broad range of subject areas, including.

Anaya: Okay. So I'm going to go ahead and turn NVDA off now.

NVDA: You know, next block, quote, click X to five. Okay.

Anaya: And then I want to show you one more thing. So as you might notice, that can get a little overwhelming if you're if you find it reading to you to be. A lot. There is a Chrome extension called sight unseen that. So this is the same guide that allows you to see what is going to be read to you, but see it in a visual sense.

It's an emulator of a screen reader, not a screen reader itself. So some people might find this helpful. So here I'm using the forward and back arrows to navigate through what's on the page, but instead of it reading out to me, it is listing that the text in the this square down on the bottom. So that's one more, one more resource there. But yeah. Do you all have any questions for me?

Kathy: The thing you just showed us. What's the point of that- flipping through and seeing the text?

Anaya: It's to get a sense of what it's like to use a screen reader. If you don't want to use a screen reader. So some of look like screen readers can be even NVDA can be really complex and have lots of different keyboard shortcuts. This one, if you hit the help button, it shows you all the keyboard commands and there's only a handful of them. So it's just it's a little bit lower barrier to entry using it. Yeah.

Lauri: So the tools that you're showing us are all free, is that correct?

Anaya: They are all. Yes. The ones that I've shown you today. NVDA is free open source and the site unseen is freely available.

Lauri: And does northeastern have. A screen reader that they. Suggest to anyone who might register with the office and say that they need this kind of service, or how does that how does how do the students or anyone who needs it through the university, what do they. Do you think I'm their own thing or. Yeah, I guess that's what I'm trying to understand. Sort of what they might use or. Yeah.

Anaya: So I'm not I'm not sure if the Accessibility Office has a specific product that they suggest. In my relatively limited experience, I've found that a lot of students will use Jaws, which is another screen reader software. Jaws is not freely available and the licenses for it can be pretty expensive, which is one of the reasons why I default to NVDA. But of course, when you're testing something you want to test it with, you know, as many screen readers as you can get at a hold on. There's also, you know, the iOS phone software has like an automatically downloaded screen reader. Windows now has one too. So there are a lot of different screen reader softwares and they all can be slightly different and have slightly different kind of pros and cons to them. So it does it does a lot down to kind of personal preference. And there's also settings that can personalize the experience as well.

Lauri: Thank you for that answer.

Anaya: Yeah.

Khyle: Thanks. I've never seen one of those before.

Anaya: Yeah, it's. It can definitely be really different from the way that we're used to navigating it. And if you are interested, you can go to YouTube and find videos of like non sighted people who are expert screen reader users. And you'll notice that they usually turn the speech speed up a lot like the screen reader will just be. Just like two or three or five times the normal speed that we would normally listen to it.And so that is kind of what that might look like or sound like when somebody is actually using it.

I was kind of trying to give you the slowed down version so that we could all, you know, understand what it was we were doing. But but recognize that when people get really good at it, they will they'll do it in a way that doesn't take as long. But I think it's also harder for us as not native users of that application to to understand

Khyle: Alvin and the Chipmunks experience.

Anaya: It is definitely that. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I hope this was helpful in understanding how a different group of people uses our software and also our our work. And also in kind of understanding, you know, when I say, please write your links this way or please do your headings this way, this is what this is what that allows to have happen and in that full functionality. So it's kind of nice to see the, the end product of that, for lack of a better word. Yeah.

Alissa: This has been very helpful and I know we're right at 12:00, but if folks want to dig more into this next week, feel free to let me know. And I if you're available, we can always revisit this and.