Screenreader Question for anyone kind enough to humor me.

Authoring Story Research and Design
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Hello everyone,

I’ve been trying to find an answer to this online, but my google fu is apparently lacking. My other thought was just to attempt to figure it out manually with a screenreader, but if I failed I wouldn’t know whether to tally that up to it being an accessibility issue or whether it was more due to my unfamiliarity and incompetence.

So, I figured I’d just come out and ask here and hopefully some seasoned Screenreader users might be willing to help.

So, the question itself has to do with YouTube. I already figured out I needed to include a transcript that matches the closed captions, because some screenreaders don’t play well with YouTube Closed Captions. However, at the end of the video, there’s an ending screen that can last 5 to 20 seconds that allows the video uploader to include up to 4 separate preselected elements or thumbnails. The elements can be a thumbnail for another video, an external link to another website, the subscribe button for the channel, and I think a couple other things. My concern, is that I don’t know if or how a screenreader would perceive these options, and, if not, what I can do to replicate them. Perhaps end the transcript with a prompt to read the video description, which includes the direct links for the same options? Or do I need to include them directly in the transcript?

I’m not sure what is the most accessible path here and any guidance from those who are most familiar with this topic would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Pinkunz

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Bang em in the description. If they’re there already, jjust mention it sometime in the video. Interested viewers with a bit of experience with YT will probably check it anyway, but it can’t hurt.

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So the assumption that these elements will otherwise invisible to a screenreader is correct?

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Looks like (NVDA issue) you have to navigate to them directly and then they’re not aria-live? Though the discussion on that issue points out that there is a plugin for NVDA.

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Thank you, both.

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I wasn’t aware this was a thing, though not sure how much of that is a Orca problem versus a YouTube problem versus a me problem. Probably doesn’t help that my habit when finding a new channel I like is to copy the channel’s URL into yt-dlp, which exacts the audio and discards the video by default with how I’ve configured it, and listening to the back catalog offline at my convenience… Though, for what its worth, I often find following links in video descriptions difficult, and I’m comfortable blaming that on YouTube.

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