Are screen readers still as terrible as that article makes them sound? Regretfully, I've never actually tried to use one, nor worked with anyone who needed one. I imagine they are basically horrific to use on almost any modern website.
My inexpert suspicion is that investment in better screen reading technology could make millions of sites accessible which currently are not, and that there should be some way to meet in the middle -- perhaps companies funding a consortium to push screen reading tech forward while at the same time making it an order of magnitude easier for a site to be accessible.
It's like the Internet Explorer debate all over again: is the problem that my website doesn't support your screen reader, or is the problem that your screen reader doesn't support my website?
Specifically, you can turn on VoiceOver on Mac with Command+F5.
Windows also has a built-in screen reader called Narrator. On Windows 10 version 1703 or later, you can turn it on with Control+Windows+Enter. As of version 1903, it works reasonably well with Chrome, Edge (both Chromium-based and legacy), and IE. Another popular option on Windows is the open-source NVDA (https://www.nvaccess.org/).
Disclosure: I'm a developer at Microsoft, on the Narrator team, but as usual, I'm posting on my own behalf.
A lot of people in this thread and others have recommended devs to try out screen readers to get familiar with developing for them, and I added to my mental checklist "look up screen readers and try to find a good one to try out eventually", which really I'm not sure I'd ever get around to, and even if I did, I'd probably get distracted from choice paralysis because I wasn't sure which screen reader is worth trying.
Immediately after reading your post, I pressed a key combo and started playing with it. I would not have guessed that getting started was literally just a key combo away. Thanks.
