Glossary · Accessibility term
VoiceOver
VoiceOver is Apple's screen reader, built into every Mac, iPhone and iPad, and into the Apple Watch, Apple TV and Vision Pro as well. It speaks the screen and it drives a braille display, which is a first-class output rather than an extra. On a phone it runs on touch gestures, swipe right for the next element and double tap to activate. It also changes what every standard gesture does, which is what makes the first ten minutes of testing feel so strange. Its share tells two different stories. On a desktop it is a distant third, the main screen reader of about one survey respondent in ten, so testing on a Mac is no substitute for testing in JAWS or NVDA on Windows. On mobile it is the opposite. Around seven in ten of the same respondents name an Apple device as their main phone, and VoiceOver is what they use on it.
In practice
The rotor is the thing to learn first, and most people testing for the first time never find it. Rotate two fingers on the screen as if turning a dial and you change what swiping up and down does. Choose Headings and swipe down to move to the next heading. That is how somebody navigates a web page with VoiceOver, and it is why heading structure matters just as much on a phone as on a laptop. A tester who does not know it exists will swipe through the page one element at a time and conclude that structure has no mobile consequence.
Two more gestures make a test session possible. Two fingers scrubbed back and forth three times, like drawing a Z, goes back or dismisses an alert. Three fingers swiped up scrolls the page. Without those two a first attempt usually stalls almost immediately, because with VoiceOver on the gestures are how the phone is operated and the old ones no longer do what they did. An external keyboard or a braille display is the way out of gestures entirely, and Apple documents commands for both.
The screen curtain is the honest version of the test. A three-finger triple tap blacks the display while the screen stays live underneath, so a sighted tester stops reading along and starts finding out. Add a finger if you also have Zoom switched on, because that combination moves the gesture to a three-finger quadruple tap and is why the shortcut sometimes appears not to work. Item Chooser, a two-finger triple tap, brings up a searchable list of what VoiceOver can reach, which is a fast way to check whether an element you suspect is missing has been exposed at all.
Braille is a first-class output rather than an extra. VoiceOver drives more than 70 refreshable displays on iPhone and iPad and more than 100 on a Mac, supports contracted and uncontracted braille, and lets somebody type in braille directly on the touchscreen. In WebAIM's survey, 54.2% of VoiceOver users among respondents with disabilities said they read at least some content that way, a higher share than for any other screen reader in the same survey.
One thing that can hide a finding from you. VoiceOver users can rename a badly labeled control on their own device and keep the new label. Somebody testing on their own phone may sail straight past something they quietly fixed for themselves months ago.
Why it matters
It is the lowest-friction way for an owner or a designer on a Mac to hear their own site. Nothing to install and nothing to pay, because it ships with the operating system, so the cost is an afternoon of learning the gestures rather than a purchase. The caution is geographic as much as anything. Apple's share among screen reader users is very high in North America, Australia and Europe, and much lower in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. So the mobile dominance that makes VoiceOver essential is a regional fact rather than a universal one, and a global audience changes what your test matrix should look like.
Twenty minutes that finds something
On an iPhone, turn VoiceOver on, open your own site, set the rotor to Headings and swipe down through the page. If the headings do not describe the page in order, or if there are none, you have found the thing seven in ten screen reader users would have reached for first.
Where this shows up on the site
Related terms
- NVDANVDA is a free, open-source screen reader for Windows, made by NV Access, and more people reach for it than for anything else.
- JAWSJAWS is the long-established commercial screen reader for Windows, made by Freedom Scientific, and the one named most often when people are asked which screen reader they use first.
- NarratorNarrator is Microsoft's screen reader, and what matters about it is the shape of its use rather than its feature list.
- Screen readerA screen reader is software that reads the screen out loud, or sends it to a braille display, for people who cannot see it.
- Assistive technologyAssistive technology is hardware or software that gives a person with a disability more than a mainstream browser offers on its own.
- Manual testingManual testing is a person working through a page against the rules a machine cannot decide.
Knowing the word is the easy part.
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