Question:
How do screen reader users navigate through email clients?
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Answer:
This question comes from a coworker who is building their first big accessible modular system. We were going over their first draft the other day and they asked an important question about how screen reader users navigate through email clients.
I think one of the hardest mental leaps to make in accessibility is wrapping your head around how different people interact with digital products we all use every day. There is a kind of veil over assistive technology that can feel somewhat sacred, or scary, or “not for me”.
In reality – these are just utilities on digital devices. They are not magical. They are programmed by people to be used by people. I know you know that, but I think it kinda helps to think of them as a utility that you’ve never used before. It automatically tones down the scary feelings. Just like every piece of software you’ve ever used – the first time you tried it you didn’t do a great job. You couldn’t find what you were looking for, it was disorienting, and in some cases you couldn’t figure out how to turn it off. 🙂
I also think that it is nearly impossible to really think about how other humans use software in ways that are not known to you. If you can’t see the screen, how do you know that you’re opening an email and not something else? These are all largely made up ways to interact with a computer – just like a mouse was a made up way to interact with a computer way back when. When you’re used to only using a computer one way, it can feel really disorienting to use it a different way.
And that makes it harder to experiment with. How do I know if what I’m experiencing is the way it’s supposed to be or if I’m just messing it up? Why is this image read as “image” in one screen reader, but is “graphic” in another? What did I do wrong? It takes time and a good amount of reading and experimenting to sort some of this out, but just like any software you use, once you get used to it and understand more of how it works – it gets easier. (PS you didn’t do anything wrong, different screen readers read things somewhat differently and that’s expected)
It helps to think of a screen reader as someone who is literally standing over your shoulder and reading what is on the screen to you. Super simplistic, yes, but when you think of it this way it starts to make sense.
Someone standing over you reading your screen would tell you that you’ve selected the outlook icon, that you’ve opened outlook, that you have 4 new emails and maybe read the subject line of the first email in your unreads. When you navigate to a specific email, they would tell you who it’s from and the subject line and maybe the preheader text.
This is essentially the conversation your eyes are having with your brain too. “Oh yup that’s the outlook icon, clicked on that and now I’m in Outlook. Oh hey I have 4 unread emails, that top one is about the new shoes I ordered.”
This is kinda the crux of a lot of digital assistive technologies – you are getting the same information via a different input type. An audio book is exactly like a printed book just using a different sensory input to pull in that content. Literally auditory instead of visual. (This is why my student advocacy group says, “Ear reading is reading not cheating!” because the input modality of the reading isn’t up for dispute)
So when a screen reader user opens an email program or app, or goes to a webmail client in a browser, it works very similarly to how you likely do it: You navigate to where you want to go and start reading your email. The difference is the exact mechanism.
Each major device type and email client will have its own quirks. In most computers while using a screen reader, there are special keyboard functions that can be used to navigate the specific email client. Literally google “how to read email in gmail screen reader” and you’ll quickly find a user guide, sub in the email client of your choice.
For mobile devices it gets quite a bit more complicated because the way you navigate iphones and androids using a screen reader changes pretty fundamentally by increasing the numbers of fingers you use to swipe, or adding directional swipes, taps, rotors, and other different navigation types. I don’t really recommend starting with mobile devices for this reason, but once you get the hang of it – it gets easier. (but never easy lol)
You don’t need to memorize or know how to navigate email clients, it’s super helpful in continuing to help you understand the experience of using a screen reader, but it’s not necessary for testing emails. Someone asked once if I used a blindfold when testing to make sure everything works correctly, and wow would that be extra challenging. My goal is to understand how screen readers work with email clients, not to be a super user. I flub my way through these things too, especially if I’m really trying to dig into specific components and are using all the devices, email clients, and screen readers at my disposal. Usually I use a mouse to open the email I’m wanting to review and then use screen reader tools once I’m in the email.
That’s because everything outside of your email is determined by the email client and there’s not anything in our code that can change that. When screen reader users read your email they know they are in an email client and they are reading an email from your from address because that’s one of the things a screen reader will tell them before they enter the individual email, along with the subject line.
I think it’s important to note that users will already know these things. Just like in alt text we don’t need to declare our image with “Image of” – we also don’t need to declare our email as an email, that is redundant structural information that the screen reader already communicates to the user. We are not starting from scratch here – we are using an already established program that’s been used for decades, we can build off of the experience that already exists.
It’s really great to be helpful, but we need to make sure that we’re actually helping users get the information that they need. That’s one of the reasons why I think it’s so critical to understand how different users use these assistive technologies: when we understand it we can actually do the work we’re setting out to do and make our emails accessible.