dvd-style commentaries and screen readers

[runpunkrun]

Hi folks, I need some help with making the author commentaries I've written compatible with screen readers. Author commentaries are story texts that have paragraphs of commentary inserted into them. In the two I've written, the only way to differentiate between story and commentary is visually and I'd like to fix that. Here's how my commentary for "Meanwhile, Back in Metropolis" is currently formatted using css. Paragraphs of commentary are set off from the story by a blue background, which I'm sure a screen reader couldn't care less about. I could easily create a div class "commentary" for those sections, but I don't know if screen readers typically announce that sort of information.

So my question is: How can I set apart the commentary sections in a satisfactory way for fans with screen readers?

Googling, I found Designing for Screen Reader Compatibility, which describes how to hide content visually while still making it available to screen readers. I could add "Commentary:" in hidden text in front of every section of commentary. But would it have to be in front of every paragraph, or is once a div enough? Would it be helpful to have a hidden "end commentary" text as well?

I only have a basic understanding of how screen readers work, so if there's a simple solution that I've overlooked, it's probably because I didn't realize it was an option. I'd appreciate your input and any suggestions you might have. I know that not everyone uses their screen reader in the same way.

Thank you for your help.

Comments

[lightgetsin]

I think this is like most other questions of screenreader access: there are actually a good ten or twenty ways to do it, and you've just gotta pick one that is most likely to work for the most people. And even more importantly than that, tell people what it is.

Because I can make my screenreader deal with most things. But I can't do it when I don't know they're there. Your blue backgrounds, for example -- I can get my screenreader to tell me the background color of something I'm sitting on, but it would never occur to me to do it because I don't think that way. Also, I'm pretty sure i can't get it to indicate change in background color in-text as I'm continuously reading.

Some ways to do it:

Commentary in italics -- people can opt to have italics indicated or read in a different voice. I have this turned on 100% of the time because I prefer it, and the last time I did a commentary of my own, that's how I did it. And I suspect most people in fandom would opt to turn that on, too, because it's useful information. But I don't know for sure.

Set off commentary with []'s or *'s or some other symbol that is searchable and will be indicated in continuous reading.

Set them off in blockquotes (this is also nice because a screenreader user can jump blockquote to blockquote with a single keystroke. Like scrolling fast and only reading blue boxes).

Invisitext like you mentioned. I at first thought that was kind of clunky, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized it might actually be able to reach the most people, since reading invisible text is not something you turn off and on, it just happens. In that case I'd indicate start and finish of the text with something very very brief, or else it will get annoying fast.

You could use a wai-aria landmark region for each block of commentary. Kind of like your div class idea, but designed specifically to do what you want it to do. If you want to be very cool and snazzy and cutting edge, try that.

...There are lots more. But the most important thing is to put a note at the top. "Commentary is in italics" or "commentary is enclosed in square brackets []." That's the real value, imho. Because I've backed out of a story file for having some sort of inaccessible formatting, but a lot of those times, if I'd wanted to read it, I would have been able to tweak my settings to do it if I knew what I needed to do.

N.b. obviously kind of a power user way of thinking about it. And also, this is mostly specific to Jaws. Voiceover is not nearly so fine-grained in my experience, but then again, it's usually on my phone, so I expect to have a lot less flexibility at my fingertips anyway.

[runpunkrun]

This helps a lot, thank you. I think I'll go with the invisitext, because that's also useful if a sighted user kills my css, and, as you say, it's not something you have to turn on. Maybe I'll make those sections divs or blockquotes, as well, so users can skip right to them. If that's not overkill. And I will definitely put a note at the top explaining how the page is arranged.

[jesse_the_k]

And the sighted user might be killing your CSS to read on a phone or in larger print (just making that obvious, as a CSS slayer myself).

[runpunkrun]

Right, or maybe the colors I chose cause eye strain. Lots of reasons to kill css, and since the layout I was using for these commentaries depended 100% on that css, I'm trying to make this version understandable without it.