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Screen readers 0:54

A 54-second explainer of Screen readers, narrated over the same demo you can try yourself.

The Screen readers explainer. Prefer to do it yourself? Try the interactive demo.

Try the interactive Screen readers demo

What this video covers

A screen reader is software that speaks (or sends to a braille display) what's on screen, letting blind and low-vision people use a computer by ear. Crucially, it turns a two-dimensional visual layout into a one-dimensional stream - read in source order, element by element - so the experience is linear, sequential, and entirely dependent on the meaning in your markup.

Step through the layout the way a screen reader does and the neat 2D grid became a single-file queue: image, heading, price, button, image, heading… one after another, no skimming. Suddenly it's obvious why source order, alt text and headings matter so much - by ear, they're the only things to navigate by. The picture you see is not the page they get.

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