Hello! I noticed that some of your fics on Ao3 are tagged "Screen Reader Friendly," and I wondered what makes a fic screen reader friendly. Is it just about formatting, or does content matter too?
Hi, thank you so much for asking this question!!! Disclaimer I am not visually impaired so all of this information I have learned by seeing blind or visually impaired people talk about this issue.
Itâs primarily formatting! Iâll list everything I do to try to make my fics accessible here.
Line breaks!!! Use the ao3 line break code instead of adding a bunch of symbols. This is the biggest thing I had to change once I realized my fics were not screen reader friendly.
HOWEVER some screen readers wonât pick up on the horizontal line, either. Another good option is to use a short series of symbols, for example: â~~â or â- - -â
Basically, just donât use more than three symbols in a row. I used to use â~~~/\~~~â with a delta symbol in the middle to look like the triforce, but a screen reader would see that and say âasterisk asterisk asterisk delta asterisk asterisk asteriskâ which is pretty annoying lol
Most screen readers donât differentiate between regular text and bold/italics. Itâs fine to have those in your story, but if the bold/italics significantly changes the plot or the implications of a sentence then it is not screen reader friendly
Screen readers canât describe a line break that is just an empty space. For example, in one of my fics I have a character reading a note, and I have an extra âreturn buttonâ space before and after the note to make the note distinct from the rest of the text. To make that fic more screen reader friendly, instead of just an empty space, I wrote â[Line Break]â. That way, a screen reader can say âline breakâ, and readers still recognize it as a line break
If you have any sort of chat fic (AND this goes for hashtags on tumblr too!) with screen names, be sure to distinguish the separate words in the screen name. You can do this with by capitalizing the first letter of each word like this âScreenNameHereâ or with dashes in between each word âscreen-name-hereâ. That helps screen readers and also people with things like dyslexia who have trouble distinguishing words if they arenât capitalized or separated in some way.
Screen readers can read image emojis like this smiley face đ because they have embedded alt text, but they canât read text emojis as an emoji, like this one â:Dâ. If you use any of those in your fic, add a description like this: â :D [Image description: text emoji of a smiley face with a big, open mouthed smile. End description].â
Also, this one doesnât have to do with a screen reader, but if you have an image embedded in your story, keep these things in mind:
Be sure to describe the image so anyone who is blind or visually impaired can still experience the image. I donât think itâs possible to add alt text to the actual image, so I usually put this below the image: â[Image ID: description of the image. Note the important details, but be as concise as you can. /End ID]â. Including the image description instead of some sort of alt text is good for DeafBlind people who canât see the image well enough but donât use a screen reader.
Some blind or visually impaired people donât use a screen reader and instead zoom in on the text. If an image is embedded in the story, be sure it is sized correctly. If it isnât, it can make scrolling sideways to read zoomed in text more difficult because it makes the webpage much wider than the text itself.
Not all my fics have the screen reader friendly tag because 1. There might be a few I havenât updated yet, and 2. I didnât include the tag on fics that have weird formatting or are accent heavy. For example, in Kinship I wrote Twilightâs dialogue to represent his strong accent, and those kinds of things with apostrophes and half-words donât come through well with a screen reader.
I personally donât think itâs good practice to include a ton of apostrophes or shortened words to distinguish an accent. Even for people not using screen readers, itâs hard to read. For me, if I see a fic with things like that, I wonât read it. Maybe try having a few words that the characterâs accent comes through on, or write something about their heavy accent outside of the dialogue.
The âScreen Reader Friendlyâ tag isnât an officially recognized AO3 tag yet, but the more people who use it, the sooner it will be!
Those are all the things I can think of right now. If anyone has any other tips to add, please do so!!
