From Screen to Speech: A Screen Reader Journey

Let’s enhance our understanding of screen readers! We’ll cover the end-to-end story of how pixels on the screen get translated into audio announcements and build our mental models of how screen readers actually work.

Strong mental models can help us navigate ambiguous scenarios more effectively, address complex accessibility issues, and better grasp the consequences of our decisions.

We’ll cover the role of ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications), accessibility APIs, the accessibility tree, and more. I’ll include some examples of how this understanding led to better outcomes at Canva, my “aha moments,” and how to inspect the accessibility tree in developer tools.