Screen Readers and X: What Works and What Gets in the Way

A screen reader turns what is on screen into speech or braille, and lets the user move around with gestures or keys instead of looking. On a social platform that changes constantly, the experience depends on three things: how the app or site is built, how the screen reader interprets it, and how the people posting write. You control only the last one, but it helps to understand the other two.

This guide is written for two groups: people who post on X and want to understand what their screen reader followers hear, and people who are new to using a screen reader with X. If you already use one daily, you know most of this better than we do, and we would be glad to hear what we got wrong through the contact page.

The main screen readers

Each platform has its own:

• VoiceOver is built into iPhone, iPad and Mac. On touch screens you swipe right and left to move between items and double-tap to activate.
• TalkBack is built into most Android phones and works in a similar way.
• On Windows, NVDA is free and open source, JAWS is a commercial product used widely in workplaces, and Narrator is built into the system.

Today the practical choices are the official X apps and the website in a desktop browser. Third-party X apps were once a popular choice for accessibility, but most of them stopped working when the platform restricted API access in 2023.

Moving through a timeline

On a phone, swiping moves item by item. A single post is usually treated as one item that reads the name, handle, time, the text, and then the reply, repost, like and view counts, with the action buttons available as separate items or through a custom actions menu. That is a lot of speech per post, so experienced users tend to flick past the parts they do not need, or use the screen reader's rotor or reading controls to jump between posts.

On the web, X has keyboard shortcuts. Pressing the question mark key shows the list. The ones that matter most for reading are J and K to move to the next and previous post, and Enter to open the selected one. The complication is that NVDA and JAWS use single letters for their own navigation while in browse mode. To let J and K reach the page, switch to focus mode (NVDA) or forms mode (JAWS), use the screen reader's pass-through key, or turn off quick navigation keys for the site. VoiceOver on Mac has its own Quick Nav setting that does something similar.

Threads add one more layer. When you open a post that starts a thread, the replies from the author appear below it, mixed in with replies from other people. A sighted reader sees the thin line connecting the author's posts; a screen reader user has to listen to the name on each post to tell them apart. This is one of the most common frustrations with long threads, and it is the main reason the reader on this site filters to one author by default.

Settings worth checking

X has an accessibility section in its settings, under the display and languages area. The exact labels change from time to time, but it has included options to increase color contrast, reduce motion, and control whether videos and GIFs play automatically. Autoplay is worth turning off if you use a screen reader: a video that starts by itself can talk over your speech.

On the device side, two settings matter a lot for X:

• Speech rate. The timeline is wordy, so most users run their screen reader faster on social media than they would for a novel.
• Verbosity. Screen readers can announce the role of every element ("button", "link", "heading level 2"). Turning verbosity down cuts much of the repetition around each post.

What a thread sounds like

Here is what someone hears when they reach a typical post in a thread, read straight through:

Sample Writer, at sample writer, 2 hours. 3 slash 12. Here's the part nobody tells you about, thread emoji, pointing down emoji. Image. 14 replies, 52 reposts, 380 likes, 21 thousand views.

That "Image" with nothing after it is the most damaging part. Without a description, the listener does not know whether they missed a chart, a screenshot of a key document, or a joke. The other noise is annoying, but at least it can be skipped. The accessibility guide goes through each piece and how to fix it as the writer.

Image descriptions from the reader's side

When an image has a description, an ALT badge appears on it. Screen readers generally read the description when they reach the image, so the user does not have to open anything. Sighted people can select the badge to see the description too, which is a nice side effect: alt text helps people on slow connections and anyone who cannot make out a small screenshot.

Some screen readers and operating systems can now describe images automatically. These descriptions are improving, but they still guess. They can tell you a screenshot contains text, and often read that text, but they cannot tell you which part of the chart the writer wanted you to notice. A written description from the person posting is still better.

Where a reading view helps

A screen reader is a general tool. It reads whatever the app presents, in the order the app presents it. For a long thread, that means wading through the same framing around every post. Copying the thread into a plain reading view removes the framing and leaves only the words, which is a different kind of listening: closer to reading an article than browsing a feed.

The reader on this site is built to work with screen readers. The reading view is ordinary paragraphs with no extra roles, the controls are standard buttons with labels, and keyboard shortcuts are ignored while you are typing in a field. If you prefer your screen reader's own voice to the browser's, ignore the play button entirely: paste the thread, then read the cleaned text with your usual commands. See our accessibility statement for what we have tested.

For people who post

If you take one thing from this guide, make it image descriptions. They are the difference between a post that can be understood and one that cannot. After that, keep numbering short, put mentions and links at the end, and do not let emoji replace words. The guide to writing posts that read well aloud covers the rest.

Questions