Hi,
Ultimately, it is up to operating
systems (such as Windows) to reveal this information to web
browsers. On Windows, screen readers can inform Windows that
they are active through a Windows API function named
SystemParametersInfo (part of user32.dll), which is meant to
be used by apps to adjust their workings, and I bet web
browsers can expose this information to web authoring
engines. Because this is a website-specific thing, I think
it would be best to ask web authors to adjust their
interfaces on the fly or add a box to suppress this (that
last bit will be cleared if you delete web cookies).
To expand upon the API discussion: a
few weeks ago some NVDA users working on PowerShell said an
alert about PSReadline was issued at startup. A conversation
with PowerShell team at Microsoft revealed that this is due
to screen reader flag detection, which ironically uses the
same Windows API function mentioned above (the difference is
which flags are passed into modify system parameters
globally). Apparently this was in response to reports that
PSReadline module (used for cursor movement, editing and
such) wasn’t working well with older NVDA releases, and I
advised Microsoft to test PSReadline with newer NVDA
releases.
As for web accessibility and screen
reader detection on the web, an ongoing discussion between
web standards stakeholders (web authors, browser vendors,
assistive technology vendors, standards bodies, academics,
and such) deals with how should software interpret seemingly
conflicting ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications)
specifications. For example, should screen readers enter
application/focus mode automatically when encountering what
is essentially a web dialog, or how should screen readers
announce form field descriptions and such. Making matters
complicated is the speed of web development as you will find
yourself meeting new browser releases every six weeks, and
that “web standards implementations” on PC’s have pretty
much became a battle between Mozilla on one side and Google
and friends across the court. At first glance, NVDA may
appear to provide the same experience, but trust me: there
are internal differences between what Firefox says versus
what Chromium family tells you (which, by the way, extends
to how NVDA supports accessibility API’s, which merits a
separate discussion; I’ll take a stab at giving you a tour
of such topics if requested).
Cheers,
Joseph
OK I am a strong believer in using Google to find answers
before I ask one here. Giving me the term SR flag did not
help much in resolving this issue. I tried all kinds of
searches using SR flag and got nothing. Maybe you can be a
little more helpful in hiding the screen reader from web
pages.
On 10/10/2020 6:59 PM, Joseph Lee wrote:
Hi,
That magic term is “sr flag”.
Cheers,
Joseph
Don,
I don't think you can stop the websites, but I
could swear that it was recently discussed that you can put
screen readers, and I think it was NVDA in particular, into
"stealth mode" at startup so that whatever flag it is that
the screen reader sets/waves to tell software looking for it
that it's present is not set. But I'll be darned if I can
remember the magic search term to find that discussion.
--
Brian - Windows
10 Pro, 64-Bit, Version 2004, Build 19041
It’s hard waking up and
realizing it’s not always black and white.
~ Kelley
Boorn
