What percentage of your traffic is from screen readers? | Hacker News Reader

What percentage of your traffic is from screen readers?

What percentage of your traffic is from screen readers? People talk about the absolute importance of accessibility a lot these days and I'm wondering if adding all this extra markup is worth the time. Most of the sites I work on are so image/media-heavy that I can't imagine anybody using a screen reader would get much use out of them anyway. Thoughts, numbers?

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It depends on what you mean by "image/media-heavy". If you have a website that is basically made of image galleries, you can still make it accessible for blind people by giving descriptions of each picture. The problem is that describing a picture is hard: if you have a picture of a generic tree, you can give it the caption "A tree", but what if you want to give details of your hypothetical tree? To continue the tree metaphor, you shouldn't miss the forest for the trees: a blind visitor may want to know each detail in the tree, but most blind visitors just want to know that the picture has a generic tree so they can move on to find the information they actually need.

With videos, subtitles/captions are useful for deaf users, and useful for blind people when a video has no narration, just a soundtrack.

I say the reason screen readers are given a higher importance than unusual or outdated browsers is a matter of being able to choose. When you use an old browser, you can choose to upgrade. When you have a disability, you can't choose to not have that disability: you're stuck with screen readers until a better way to browse the web with your physical constraints is found.

If you make content accessible for screen readers, you are effectively making content more accessible for search engines as well [0].

high accessibility overlaps heavily with effective white hat SEO. The goal of accessibility is to make web content accessible to as many people as possible, including those who experience that content under technical, physical, or other constraints. It may be useful to think of search engines as users with substantial constraints: they can’t read text in images, can’t interpret JavaScript or applets, and can’t “view” many other kinds of multimedia content. These are the types of problems that accessibility is supposed to solve in the first place.

[0] http://alistapart.com/article/accessibilityseo

You should make your website accessible not because the number of users with a screen reader is ever going to be higher than some arbitrary number, but because content should be available to everyone, not just the sighted or those with color vision or those who can navigate with a mouse. The precise threshold at which "don't be a dick" comes into play is up to you, but I would not like to be on the wrong side of that line.

/college roommate was legally blind; husband's grandparents met in a high school for the blind

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