Accessibility Specialist | Editorial Manager | Trainer | Digital Publishing | eLearning | Inclusive Content | Instructional Design
Accessibility tip: Reading order isn't always left to right and top to bottom. The term "reading order" refers to the path that screen readers follow through the content. When a user selects the down arrow, the screen reader goes to the next point on the path. The next point could be text, an image, or an interactive element. But it should make sense based on the intended user experience. Luckily, we can customize the reading order to fit how we want people to use the product. For example, in PDF, we set the order by adjusting the sequence of the tags in the Tags Panel. PowerPoint also has a Reading Order Pane located at Review / Check Accessibility. The reading order should match the visual flow of the page. For content in European languages, this is usually left to right and top to bottom. But not always. Consider the example in the post image. It shows a page from a grade-school reader. An illustration fills the top two thirds of the page, and the story text is below it. In terms of reading order, this is pretty straight forward, right? The illustration is above the story text. So, it should come first. Not so fast. Reading order also affects how people use alt text. Alt text is contextual. In other words, the way we describe an image depends on how it relates to the other content. In this case, the story text is the main narrative. It introduces an action or event. The illustration then expands on the story text. It represents the action or event in more detail. So, the story text provides *context* for the image description. It helps readers understand why the alt text includes certain details or words. If that's the case, where should the story text be in the reading order? Before or after the illustration? I vote for "before." That way, readers are prepped to understand the alt text when they first encounter it. They don't need to mentally backtrack to figure out how the picture represents the story. In the end, reading order isn't just about position. It's also about purpose. Image note: The image is described in the body of the post. #accessibility #education #EdTech #K12 #publishing
Sara Shunkwiler
1mo
It's both helpful and frustrating that PPT flags the reading order as an accessibility error if you don't match their algorithm. It's great that it prompts you to check, but I have set a logical order and then had our technicians change it to something odd just to make the error go away! Half of the time I can't figure out what PPT thinks the order SHOULD be. Top to bottom or right to left doesn't work for complex math and STEM content. Peter Wu, and Clint Covington I can't see any of the messages in our Teams chat now... I was going to tag the Accessibility Checker developer who joined us. We may have to switch to email because Teams is cutting me out of math conversations!
In every PowerPoint accessibility workshop I lead, Reading Order is always the big ‘a-ha!’ moment for participants.
Jennifer Cronin
1mo
Yes! Thank you!!! The number of times that I have had to explain this to people is unreal.
"In the end, reading order isn't just about position. It's also about purpose." This is such a helpful example, thank you!
Especially if the illustration is AI generated and doesn't actually explain anything because the robot didn't understand what it did!! 🤣 Seriously folks, some of us do work the other way around "If I can draw it, I can understand it. If I can understand it, I can draw it." . . . and "to have a camera is to have a voice!" But that's just me
Principal Accessibility Solutions Engineer – iOS
3wvisually you probably look at the illustration before you look at the text below it so that's the reading order you want, the visual order