Seeing through sound: Screen reader testing for sighted teams

Many accessibility issues are hidden in plain sight, especially within “approved” design system components. A button that looks perfect can be confusing to a screen reader. A modal that meets a spec can trap keyboard focus. A form that passes a quick audit can still be exhausting to complete.

This session is built around short, practical video clips: real screen reader tests of common web components (menus, modals, carousels, tabs, accordions, forms and alerts), narrated by a sighted practitioner using VoiceOver. To help sighted teams understand what’s happening beyond the audio, each clip pairs the screen reader output with visual simulations that approximate different kinds of visual impairment. We’ll unpack what’s going wrong, why it happens, how to fix it and how to prevent it through better patterns and “definition of done” checks.

Along the way, we’ll address the limits of sighted-only testing and why the most reliable accessibility programs budget for disabled testers and lived-experience feedback. Because assumptions, even well-intended ones, miss the things that matter in real use.