Thursday, August 14, 2014

Idea: A screenreader that's a market place, not a queue

Had this idea while in a meeting at work today where ADA was being talked about; and how making a page ADA compliant required reordering the markup - sometimes entirely.

What if the screen reader didn't read sequentially - like a queue of people who talk to a teller - and instead read everything that's on a page at the same time - almost like a marketplace where everyone's talking at the same time?

I'm not blind, but I have to imagine that this is how blind people perceive the real world anyway - as a cacophony of sounds that they have to filter out noise from. This is not that different from fully able people sensing the world and filtering what's important.

If we had such a screen reader, the document markup could be the cue for how "loud" each element would be, child elements could be "muted" in favor of the parent and so forth.

Todo: check if screen readers already do this.