When VoiceOver is speaking the text of articles, it divides speech on every link to announce that there is a link. This is reasonable when links are sparse and separate. However, in Wikipedia, there is a huge number of links that start directly from words in the sentences in the main text. At the same time it is exactly this text that is the most important content for the user. The presence of links, although technically correct, makes the text very hard to read for a VoiceOver user. Here is an example of what a VoiceOver user hears when reading an article about Wikipedia:
Jimmy Wales. Link. And Larry Sanger. Link. Launched Wikipedia on January 15, 2001. Sanger. Nine. Link. Coined its name. Ten. Link. A portmanteau. Link. Of. Wiki. Link. Notes 3. Link. And. Encyclopedia. Link. Initially only in English, Wikipedia quickly became multilingual. Link. As it developed similar versions in other languages. Link.
The result in speech is very hard to understand, especially as also the prosody and intonation of sentences is completely broken by the links (I tried to mirror this visually by the use of punctuation in the above text.)
Segmentation of text caused by link words also makes it more complicated to navigate the text (i.e. move forward and backward in it) because the links are treated as separate objects.
This is a complex issue. The technically correct solution of course is to fix VoiceOver to handle the reading of densely hyperlinked text in a better way, e.g. to indicate links by a short background sound and to maintain the prosody and intonation of sentences undisturbed. Unfortunately it does not seem likely that Apple would fix this in near future. No other screen readers exist on iOS, so Wikipedia needs to take this issue of the platform into account and still aim to provide some reasonable experience.
I would propose two lines of action:
- File and maintain a bug in Apple Bug Report. Contact the appropriate people in Apple and push for this issue to be given priority, because this absolutely must be solved in order for Wikipedia to provide a reasonable experience.
- Devise a workaround in the app itself allowing a blind user to temporarily remove links from text. One possible solution might be the following:
- React to some VoiceOver’s gesture (e.g. the Magic Tap or a long tap) by switching links on/off inside the article (this would likely mean removing interactivity from the a elements through javascript).
- Add “Do not display links in articles” toggle into the apps Settings Accessibility section. With an additional note under it this could also inform users that it can be easily toggled by the gesture.
I am aware that the setting "Do not display links in articles" sounds rough, but as the situation is now, I know some less skilled users would actually prefer to sacrifice the interlinking capability of Wikipedia in order to be at least able to understand the primary article that they searched for.
However, I think this workaround still needs more thought. In particular, I would have two concerns:
- The setting in Settings doesn't seem to be enough to let VoiceOver users know that this functionality is there and that it would solve their problem.
- By blocking a VoiceOver gesture such as Magic Tap for this functionality we sacrifice the possibility to use it in some other way, which could be our concern once we move to trying to make the app really nice and well usable for VoiceOver users. By design, Magic Tap should mean "the most obvious action" in an application. I believe in Wikipedia this would likely be immediate access to Search (from anywhere in the app).