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By standing on the shoulders of giants, Chapter 2: Accessibility has gone much easier than I even anticipated. Excerpt from the chapter, specifically the intro to the section "Screen readers can handle Ajax:"

If a user cannot see the screen (and the web application within it), they will need something to describe and read it to them. Note that it describes, as well as reads it. As touched upon in Chapter 2: Usability, semantic markup makes these descriptions much more relevant and meaningful to someone who does not (for example) have the ability to tell at a glance that four links have anything to do with each other, let alone that they provide navigation access to other parts of the web application.

A common misconception among Ajax developers and users alike: screen readers cannot handle dynamic content. They can, but similarly to supporting all of the major rendering engines of browsers, supporting the major engines in screen readers takes time and understanding. As a common example, Jaws and Windows-Eyes might recognize a focus change as a point to start reading, while Home Page Reader does not. As such, much like writing generic or all-encompassing code to support multiple browsers, writing scripts to dynamically change the DOM structure just needs to include all of the steps necessary for the most commonly used and supported screen readers.

Though use of text-only browsers such as Lynx or screen reader simulations such as the Firefox extension, Fangs do prove incredibly useful for quickly and easily checking a web application on initial page load, only by using a fully-fledged screen reader can you accurately and consistently test a dynamic web application. Jaws, developed by Freedom Scientific, has put itself into the majority of the market, especially in the United States, commanding a portion of the market comparable to IE's market share of browsers.

For developers whose primary development environment does not happen to consist of Windows and IE, the Fire Vox extension for Firefox has recently come onto the scene, and can run in Windows, Mac, and Linux. Initially written as a demo of CLC-4-TTS1, the extension has proven quite popular, and (through the CLC-4-TTS library) has beaten all of the big names in screen readers to offering support for the drafted WAI-ARIA guidelines, explored later in this chapter. It also provides MathML support (which Firefox supports "out of the box") and support for the CSS3 Speech Module.

1. 1 Core Library Components for Text-to-Speech, written by Charles L. Chen, also the author of the Fire Vox extension