Screen Reader Testing
Screen reader testing verifies a product using actual screen reader software — VoiceOver, NVDA, JAWS, TalkBack — confirming content is announced correctly, in a logical order, with proper labels and roles for interactive elements, the way a blind or low-vision user would actually experience it.
It's widely considered the single most important manual accessibility check specifically because it directly exposes the gap between "technically has some ARIA and alt text" and "is genuinely usable" — a page can pass every automated accessibility scan while still being confusing or unusable with a real screen reader, if labels are misleading or reading order doesn't match logical structure.
Different screen readers have real behavioral differences worth testing across — VoiceOver (built into macOS/iOS), NVDA (free, widely used on Windows), and JAWS (a common enterprise Windows screen reader) don't always announce the same markup identically, so testing with just one isn't fully representative of the real, varied user base.
