Screen readers and keyboard use

This article describes what OutaStory actually offers people who read
with a screen reader or navigate by keyboard, and it is deliberately
written without promises we cannot back up.

How the pages are built

The reader is built from ordinary semantic HTML — real headings, real
landmarks, real links and real buttons. That matters because it means
your screen reader can move through a chapter the way it moves through
any well-structured web page, using the commands you already know:

jump between headings to move from chapter title to section,
jump between landmarks to get from navigation to the main content,
pull up a list of links to see where a page can take you.

We have not built a bespoke reading mode with its own commands to learn.
The structure is the interface.

NVDA, JAWS, VoiceOver and TalkBack are the screen readers
people use with OutaStory. We name them here because they are the tools
in use, not as a compatibility promise — behaviour differs between
readers, browsers and versions.

Moving with the keyboard

You can move through the interface with Tab (and Shift+Tab to go
back) and activate the focused control with Enter or Space, the
same as anywhere else on the web. There are no custom shortcuts to
memorise.

Reading aids that exist today

At Profile → Reading settings
(/profile/reader-settings):

the Dyslexia font, which renders the text in OpenDyslexic,
a text-size stepper from 14 px to 22 px in 1 px steps,
three line spacing settings — Compact, Normal and Relaxed.

At Profile → Theme (/profile/theme):

the High Contrast theme — pure black and white, with no animation.
It is chosen from the theme list like any other theme.

And beyond the visual settings: many stories carry audio narration,
which is an alternative to reading the text at all. Where an author has
had a story narrated, you can listen to it instead.

Motion

OutaStory honours your operating system's reduced-motion setting. If
you have asked your device to keep animation to a minimum, the app
follows that — you do not have to set anything a second time here.

What we do not claim

We want to be straight with you: OutaStory has no published
accessibility statement, and we make no conformance claim of any
kind. Accessibility here is a work in progress. Some parts of the app
have had careful attention; others have had less, and we would rather
say so than imply a level of polish we have not verified.

Tell us what breaks

The single most useful thing you can do is tell us where it goes wrong.
Open a ticket at /help/contact and include:

the address of the page you were on,
the assistive technology you were using, with the browser or
device if you know it,
what you expected to happen, and what happened instead.

We read every one of these. A specific report — one page, one control,
one thing that did not announce itself — is worth far more to us than a
general impression, because it can be reproduced and fixed.