Google Chrome Screen Reader Support update

June 21, 2010Development

Refer to Google Chrome accessibility update

Following last weeks post about Google Chrome accessibility which was prompted by The Google Chrome Screen Reader Accessibility Petition created by Alex Hiironen, new information about Google Chrome screen reader support has been added to the Google Chrome (Chromium) wiki:

Supported Screen Readers

The latest versions of these screen readers have partial support for Chrome now:

These screen readers do not yet recognize Chrome’s non-focusable web content (links, form fields and other focusable content is spoken as expected), so you will be unable to enter “browse mode”:

We hope to work with all screen reader developers to resolve any issues so that they can enable full support for Chrome.
The list above is not a comprehensive list of all screen readers, but in the interest of prioritizing support for the greatest number of users, we believe that supporting the screen readers above will have the greatest impact. If external developers are interested in helping to add support for additional screen readers, we would welcome the help.
For more detailed information about the technical design and current status, see the Accessibility Design Document.
Categories: Development

About Steve Faulkner

Steve was the Chief Accessibility Officer at TPGi before he left in October 2023. He joined TPGi in 2006 and was previously a Senior Web Accessibility Consultant at vision australia. Steve is a member of several groups, including the W3C Web Platforms Working Group and the W3C ARIA Working Group. He is an editor of several specifications at the W3C including ARIA in HTML and HTML Accessibility API Mappings 1.0. He also develops and maintains HTML5accessibility and the JAWS bug tracker/standards support.

Comments

Priti Rohra says:
June 22, 2010 at 5:48 am

Finally the sleeping giant has woken up!

Hope others will learn a lesson and think about incorporating Accessibility in their products at the planning stage rather then post-release stage … … after facing user’s anger.

Commentator says:
June 22, 2010 at 8:43 pm

Google had already been working on Chrome accessibility long before the petition…I guess nobody bothered to check out what’s being checked into the Chrome project.

Steve Faulkner says:
June 23, 2010 at 12:38 am

I think people were aware that Google have been working on the accessibility of Google Chrome, The issue is, why is it taking so long? Google certainly has the resources and skills in-house to make chrome usable with ATs, it appears that it has been a lack of will to commit the required resources, as it as not been a priority. From reading the chrome wiki, Google still has no plans to commit resources to chrome supporting AT on linux.