Add text to speech feature to site

[mcoirad]

Less clear if there is a straightforward way of doing this.

[dmadisetti]

Screen readers are generally built into computers, but if we follow the ARIA spec: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/ARIA

Then our site should be accessible.

I think there's potentially issues with the scrolling effect currently. Was that a fixed design, or would we be open to changing that?

[dmadisetti]

If you want to read through the actual standards: https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-1.1/
This looks like another good resource: https://webaim.org/articles/visual/blind

I do think that it's important to actually consult with visually impaired/ blind people. I think it would be great to find someone who might find this site useful, otherwise I have a friend I can consult with

[mcoirad]

Sounds like there are some things we can do right off the bat, thanks for linking those specs.

[emhsieh]

Thanks for all this work! Agree to actually work with folks who use screen readers daily.

First step could be to try ourselves... as a super alpha test. Thanks for the ARIA spec. will review.

This friend's website uses this "thing" at the top of each of their articles. Do you all know more about how this works?
examples:
https://cadehildreth.com/rupaul-quotes/
https://cadehildreth.com/gender-spectrum/
(Sorry not sure about looking under the hood. You think it's automated text to speech or they had to generate it for each post?) Oh... looks like something called "Amazon AI Player" for Wordpress

EDIT:
^^^^ I think it's Amazon Polly TTS service. Not free forever:

https://aws.amazon.com/polly/
https://aws.amazon.com/polly/pricing/

[dmadisetti]

I tried a screen reader on the site (I tried built-in chrome and windows), and here are the things that stood out to me:

• No way to identify what the search boxes are
• The carousel is a little confusing as is. There are def ways to make accessible carousel though: https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices-1.1/examples/carousel/carousel-1.html?moreaccessible . In fact a carousel is may be more accessible than a list.

There's even plugins out there: https://accessible360.github.io/accessible-slick/

[mcoirad]

I went through as well and it seems we can add more metadata through the aria tags throughout the site to make it easier to understand what is going on, including for the filtering/search boxes. I think using the plugin you listed would be great. I haven't looked at how that works with the search box filters, but i have only basic JS abilities lol so don't know how easy it would be to replace.