I tried to read the article about using screen readers with a screen reader! That was a lot of hard work, I am also feeling slightly ashamed that it has taken m

I tried to read the article about using screen readers with a screen reader! That was a lot of hard work, I am also feeling slightly ashamed that it has taken me so long to give a screen reader a go. I was using ChromeVox and it took me a long time to get it to read the page, it was reading other tabs at first and there was no easy way to control it, even with eyesight. I think that accessibility can improve considerably with HTML5 and CSS grid. There is no need for pages to be a sea of divs, the document structure can be dome correctly so the page looks good with no styling, then the CSS grid layout engine can be used to make it look pretty for the sighted folk. I think that document outline is really important, and to ask yourself the question of how you would present something if it was typed up, Word document style or like a formal letter. There is no excuse for developers to not be using the correct tags, so that means header, main and footer, with articles and asides. The nav tag can be used for anything that is navigation and structured in a list. Pictures with figures and figure captions can be used too. All these elements can be targeted with CSS to be styled, there is no need to have documents have 17 nested divs each of them with many meaningless class tags when there are perfectly good elements to style. You can take a document and get the structure right and then use the elements as a skeleton in SCSS to style it. If structured properly these need not go '17 deep'. I think that if people had div-less and class-less markup and were used to styling it that way with SCSS generating the CSS then it would seem absurd to go to the unmaintainable sea of divs and class tags that passes for normal today. There does need to be more work done with HTML5 to get the perfect outline, I do use outline tools already but that is a fine art. Back to the article, the BBC do actually have people that use screen readers, I met one recently and how he used his iphone was a sight to behold, just playing with it more like how Jimi Hendrix played the guitar. Since the author works for the BBC and with the BBC being so vast he might not know the screen reader community that work there. I have suggested to people I have worked with that we get an actual partially sighted person to test web pages for accessibility. I got a 'why would you want to do that' attitude. However, I think that this is a service that should be offered to clients.