What a screen reader actually does with your documentation
Most people writing documentation have never heard their own page read aloud. It is the fastest way to understand why some of it works and some of it does not.
Listening is not reading
A sighted reader takes in a page all at once. They see that something is a heading because it is large, that something is a table because it has lines, that a warning matters because it is yellow. None of that survives being spoken.
Someone using a screen reader hears the page in one dimension, top to bottom, at speed — experienced users often run at 300 words a minute or more. They cannot skim. What they can do is jump: to the next heading, to the next table, to a list of every link. Those jumps only work if the page was built with real structure rather than visual imitations of it.
The five things that decide whether a page works
1. Headings that are headings
Navigating a long page by heading is the single most used feature. Bold text sized up by hand looks identical and offers nothing to jump to. A page with no real headings is a page that must be listened to from the start, every time.
2. Images that say something
An image with no alt text is announced as "image", or as its filename. If step four of your instructions is a screenshot, step four is gone. This is the most common failure in documentation and the cheapest to fix, because the author already knows what the picture shows.
3. Tables with header cells
With a header row, each cell is announced with the column it belongs to: "Region: North. Orders: 412." Without one, the same table is a stream of values with nothing to attach them to. Bold text in the first row is not a header row; it only looks like one.
4. Links that name their destination
Pulling up a list of every link on the page is a standard way to navigate. On a page written with "click here", that list is useless. Write the destination into the link text and it becomes a table of contents.
5. An order that makes sense spoken
A caption to the side of a screenshot reads naturally when you can see the pairing. Read aloud, it may arrive several paragraphs from the thing it describes. Layout choices that work visually can scramble the sequence for someone listening.
Try it on your own page
Every major operating system ships a screen reader: VoiceOver on macOS and iOS, Narrator on Windows, TalkBack on Android. NVDA on Windows is free and is what a great many people actually use.
Turn one on, open the page you are most proud of, and close your eyes for two minutes. You will learn more in those two minutes than from any checklist, including ours.
Why this is getting more urgent, not less
Content is increasingly consumed by ear rather than by eye — by people who are blind or have low vision, by people with dyslexia, by anyone listening while doing something else. At the same time, WebAIM's 2026 survey of a million home pages found accessibility failures rising for the first time in seven years, with 95.9% of pages carrying detectable errors.
The gap between how content is consumed and how it is written is widening. The five habits above close most of it, and none of them takes longer than the sentence they replace.