Though it will cost you money, if you use Windows, give Dragon a try. You can navigate a computer with Dragon, not just dictate.
Speech rec users experience some issues which are quite separate from those of screen reader users-- buttons with icons + hidden “accessible” text for example. We’re often told as developers that the following should be accessible:
<button><span class="offscreen">Close and return to Menu</span><i class="fa-foofoo-bar-x" aria-hidden="true"></i></button>
Making a button showing an X for example.
Sighted people have a good chance of guessing what it does (x to close, delete, or remove is one of the few icons generally used everywhere for approximately these commands), screen reader users hear the full button text, and it’s a button (and we’re assuming it works to close the whatever using Javascript).
But as a speech user, you have some issues:
- you’re not sure what name, if any, the developer gave this thing. Luckily in this case we named it starting with the word “Close” so possibly saying “click close button” is enough.
- since so many developers use anchors here, it may not even be a button. You don’t know if “click button” will highlight that.
It ought to be a focusable as well-- I see developers using anchors to do button work sometimes have their href’s stripped out (because there’s no link destination).
<a class="closeFancyDialog btn">X</a>
is not focusable usually.
A Dragon user can do a few things: try to highlight the clickables (which get numbered) and then click-by-number, or they can put focus somewhere earlier on the page and call the Tab key until they reach the clickable, or they can activate a mouse grid. You divide the page up into halfs (or parts), moving the mouse into smaller and smaller areas until it’s where you want it, then you can click the mouse.
Obviously that last part’s a pain in the butt if you have to do it a lot.
In any case, I’m still learning Dragon and actually have to retrain it because headsets with microphones are killing my ears, so it’ll have to do with my laptop mike instead. 