Lost in Silence: Understanding When Screen Readers Don’t Speak Up- DevConf.IN 2026

Описание: Title: Lost in Silence: Understanding When Screen Readers Don’t Speak Up

Speaker(s): Ayushi Midha, Aishwarya Urne

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In the world of digital accessibility, silence is seldom neutral. For users of screen readers, a missing announcement can mean confusion, distrust, or exclusion—yet the issue often remains invisible to most developers and designers. In this talk, we’ll explore how the absence of spoken feedback impacts accessibility, trust, and user experience, particularly for people navigating dynamic web interfaces. Drawing on real-world examples and practical scenarios, we’ll examine the root causes of “silent failures” (such as missing ARIA live regions, improper roles, stale live-region content) and discuss how seemingly minor markup decisions ripple into major accessibility barriers. Attendees will walk away with a clear framework for diagnosing and remedying these silent gaps: from audit strategies and end-user testing through to implementable code patterns, best practices for dynamic announcements, and how to integrate these into your UI/component library workflow. Whether you’re working in React, Web Components, or template-driven apps, you’ll gain actionable insights to ensure your components announce properly, your users feel heard, and your silent UI becomes truly inclusive.

*Key take-aways:*

Why missing announcements matter: the user-experience impact beyond visual cues

Common pitfalls in dynamic content, live regions, and state changes

A developer-friendly approach to audit, test, and fix announcement gaps

How to bake these practices into your component library or design system (for example, your team’s work with PatternFly and a custom theme)

Tips for collaboration between developers, UX designers, and accessibility testers to maintain accessibility as your product evolves
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Full schedule, including slides and other resources:
https://pretalx.devconf.info/devconf-...