Tori Clark talks about visible labels and Dragon

Tori points out that using speech input like Dragon Naturally Speaking is hard when there's no visual label, or the visual label doesn't match the programmatic label. She also says that developers need to understand that assistive technology users is a category of users that encompass more than just screen reader users. Thanks to Tenon for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Transcript Nic   Hi, I'm Nic Steenhout. And you're listening to the accessibility rule soundbite, a series of short podcasts where disabled people explain their impairment, and what barriers they encounter on the web.    Nic   First, I need to thank Tenon for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Tenon provides accessibility as a service. They offer testing, training and tooling to help fix accessibility fast.    Nic   Today, I'm talking with Tori Clark. Hi, Tori. How are you?    Tori   Hi, good. How are you?   Nic   I'm good. super happy to connect with you here. It's been a while that we spoke about it.   Tori   Absolutely, yes.   Nic   Yeah. Let me ask you this. What is your disability or your impairment?   Tori   So I actually call myself multiply disabled. For me, it means I both have multiple medical conditions and multiple limitations attached to them. And I can't really separate them out. Generally speaking, for me, it's definitely all one picture. But today I'm really here to talk about my primary disability, which is Ehlers Danlos Syndrome. And it's a connective tissue disorder that causes frequent and mostly painful subluxations and dislocations of all of my joints. In my entire body, there are no exclusions. In particular, my left shoulder is so bad that my left arm goes numb, or gets shooting pains whenever I try to use it for any repetitive task. And naturally, I'm sure most people can guess that would make it really hard to use a keyboard   Nic   And a mouse.   Tori   Yet, luckily, I do have use of my right hand mostly it does get tired after a while. But I am fortunate enough to use a mouse when I am facing blockers on the web. And not everyone has that as an option.   Nic   What's your solution? If you can't use a keyboard or no, not readily a mouse all the time? What kind of assistive technology do you use?    Tori   Yeah, so it took a while to find the right fit for me. And there aren't a lot of perfect technologies out there. But for me speech recognition, and specifically Dragon Naturally Speaking was the best fit for me because Dragon has macros and I can set it up to really work with me, rather than against me, and not all other speech recognition. Has that versatility.   Nic   Hmm. Yeah. So you spoke about blockers, what would be your greatest barrier on the web?   Tori   I have many, but if I had to pick one, I would say it's a lack of visual labels or mismatch between the visual label and the accessible name of the label. In particular, old versions of Dragon also require that the first word of the actual accessible label be the visual label otherwise, I have no idea how to interact with or click buttons or form fields, or even certain types of links.   Nic   How does that work with links or buttons that are image only like a magnifying glass for search form? Or I guess social media images like Facebook or Twitter are fairly straightforward, but we've find a lot of images as the only content of an actionable item how how do you end up interacting with that if you have to guess at what the label is?   Tori   Honestly not very well. Fortunately, there does seem to be some common language and some common icon so for me if I see a house icon that's meant to be for the homepage, I can pretty reliably say home and click on that link because did link text that's not visible is ho