![making website accessibility screen reader making website accessibility screen reader](https://miro.medium.com/max/1280/1*fwbtb_Jmkku_imv5vNFDSg.png)
MAKING WEBSITE ACCESSIBILITY SCREEN READER SOFTWARE
One study by an accessibility software company this August found that 70 percent of the websites it surveyed, ranging from ecommerce to news to government services, contain “accessibility blocks,” or quirks in the design that make them unreadable with assistive technology. Many of them may, like Greco, find the modern web to be lacking. There are around 7 million people with a visual disability in the United States, according to the National Federation of the Blind. By some measures, it’s gotten even worse. But today, the internet is far from fully accessible. Since the 1990s, the popular narrative of the internet has been one of progress: More people are online than ever and the web is increasingly open. When she does, entire chunks of the internet disappear. But many websites have features that make them impossible for her to use-unlabeled graphics, forms with missing field labels, links mysteriously named “link.” Greco says she runs into issues like this “90 percent of the time” that she spends online. Screen readers convert display text into synthesized speech or refreshable Braille, giving visual displays an audio equivalent. The internet can be like this for Greco, who is blind and uses a screen reader to wayfind online.
![making website accessibility screen reader making website accessibility screen reader](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/images/accessibility-illustration-10.png)
Oh, great, she thought, recalling some of her past experiences with online shopping: “You’re clicking on something that says, ‘graphic graphic graphic,’ or some numbered file name, or some gibberish like that.”
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A few weeks ago, Lucy Greco heard a story on NPR about more clothing retailers shuttering their stores and moving online.