Screen Readers & JS

[Belinda Mustoe]

This is slightly off topic as it isn’t course related, but I’ve got a project where someone is going to look at the site with a screen reader… so I was wondering, do screen readers read the DOM or the HTML?

For example if I had a html button that said ‘read me’ in the html, and I changed it via JS to read ‘read this’, would screen readers read out ‘read me’ or ‘read this’ ?

[Zac Gordon]

Hi Belinda!

You want to look into ARIA w JavaScript. There are a few little things you can add to make single page app designs accessible for screen readers that can also work for what you’re referencing.

We will cover this in Advanced JS Topics, but here is a quick primer:

Single Page Apps – ARIA live content regions – https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/ARIA/ARIA_Live_Regions
Basic Show Hide – ARIA hidden – https://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2012/05/html5-accessibility-chops-hidden-and-aria-hidden/

Hope that helps!

[Author]

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