UX Design
Screen Reader
A screen reader is software that reads interface content aloud, letting blind and low-vision people use a device by listening instead of looking. It also lets users navigate by headings, links, and other landmarks.
Why it matters
A screen reader experiences your page through its underlying code, not its visual layout. Understanding this changes how you build things, because a beautiful screen can still be confusing or broken when spoken aloud.
In depth
Screen readers follow the order of the DOM — the page's structured code — along with headings and ARIA roles, rather than where things sit on screen. This is why semantic HTML matters so much, and why images need text alternatives and buttons need real labels. A frequent mistake is building controls from plain divs, which give the screen reader nothing meaningful to announce.
Real-world example
VoiceOver on Apple devices, and NVDA and JAWS on Windows, let people move through a webpage element by element and hear each button, heading, and image description.
Account settings
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