Screen Reader User Survey by WebAIM

[Michael S Elledge]

Hi Everyone--

WebAIM has done a survey among 1100 screen reader users:

http://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey/

I'd love to dig into the data some more, but a couple of points are 
worth noting:

1. Expertise varies a great deal (17% expert, 41% advanced, 32% 
intermediate, 9% beginner). Expertise (no surprise) influences the 
difficulty of using certain formats.
2. Over two-thirds (69%) of screen reader users have customized their 
settings a lot or somewhat.
3. IE is still used the most by blind persons, but Firefox has a healthy 
share (about a third).
4. Headings are the most frequently used assistive method to navigate 
(76% whenever available or often)
5. Search is used somewhat less often (51% whenever available or often)
6. Skip links and accesskeys are used much less frequently (38% whenever 
available or often--another 28% use them sometimes).
7. Screen reader users were much more interested in having descriptions 
for images that enhanced the mood of a web page than evaluators (71% vs. 
35%).
8. Flash was considered very or somewhat difficult to use (71%), 
Acrobat/PDF was less difficult (48%), Frames were much less so (27% very 
or somewhat difficult).
9. Most users couldn't answer whether 2.0 or DHTML applications were 
difficult (54%), of the others 28% thought they were accessible, 18% didn't.

Mike