You don’t need to become a screen reader expert to catch some of the biggest accessibility problems on your site. You need about twenty minutes, a free screen reader that’s probably already on your computer, and a handful of commands.
Quick answer: Pick the free screen reader that matches your operating system — NVDA on Windows, VoiceOver on Mac (VoiceOver ships built in; NVDA is a free separate download). Learn a small set of commands — start/stop, read the current line, jump between headings, jump between landmarks — rather than trying to master the whole program. Then run through a real page on your site (ideally a product page and checkout, not just the homepage) with your eyes closed or your monitor off, and listen for whether it makes sense. WebAIM, the accessibility research group whose guidance underlies most of this article, puts it directly: “learning just a handful of keyboard shortcuts will allow you to conduct screen reader testing” — full proficiency isn’t the bar for a useful first pass.
This is educational content about technical accessibility testing practice, not legal advice. Consult qualified counsel for legal risk questions specific to your business.
Why bother testing with a screen reader yourself
A screen reader converts what’s on the page into speech (or braille), read out in DOM order, one element at a time. It doesn’t render your layout the way a sighted visitor sees it — no colors, no visual grouping, no “obviously this button goes with that product.” It reads what the code actually says, which surfaces problems a visual review can’t: an image with no useful alt text, a “Buy Now” button that reads as just “button” with no name, a reading order that jumps around because of CSS positioning, or a form field with no programmatically associated label.
WebAIM’s guide to testing with screen readers puts the value of this directly: “Listening to your web content rather than looking at it can be an ‘eye-opening’ experience that takes sighted users out of their normal comfort zone.” That discomfort is the point — it reliably turns up things a visual QA pass misses, down to spelling mistakes that become obvious the moment they’re mispronounced out loud.
This isn’t a replacement for testing with actual screen reader users, and it isn’t a substitute for a full audit — it’s a fast, free way to catch obvious problems yourself, and to get a feel for what an audit report is describing when it flags something.
Which screen reader to start with
You have more than one free option, and which one makes sense depends on what you’re already running:
- NVDA (Windows) — free, open-source, downloadable from nvaccess.org.
- VoiceOver (Mac and iOS) — built into every Mac and iPhone at no extra cost; nothing to install.
- JAWS (Windows) — the most widely used screen reader among daily users, but it costs over $1,000, a poor pick for an occasional self-check.
- Narrator (Windows) — built into Windows already, a reasonable fallback if you can’t install NVDA on a locked-down machine.
Data on which screen readers real users rely on comes from WebAIM’s Screen Reader User Survey #10 (December 2023–January 2024, 1,539 valid responses): as a primary desktop/laptop screen reader, JAWS led at 40.5% and NVDA followed closely at 37.7%, with VoiceOver at 9.7%. On mobile, the picture flips — VoiceOver was used by 70.6% of respondents. Notably, 71.6% of respondents use more than one screen reader regularly, which is part of why WebAIM doesn’t push testers toward mastering any single tool: “Test your content in at least one of these. Most screen readers are about equal in terms of capabilities with web content.” For a first self-check, NVDA (Windows) or VoiceOver (Mac) — whichever matches your machine — is a reasonable starting point.
The handful of commands you actually need
You don’t need the full command reference. These cover a first pass:
NVDA (Windows) — per NV Access’s official User Guide:
- Start:
Control+Alt+N. Exit:NVDA+Q, then Enter. The “NVDA key” used below isInsertby default. - Read the current line:
NVDA+Up Arrow. - Jump to next/previous heading:
H/Shift+H. - Jump to the next landmark region (header, nav, main):
D. - Open the Elements List (all headings and links at once):
NVDA+F7.
VoiceOver (Mac) — per Apple’s official VoiceOver User Guide:
- Turn on/off:
Command+F5, or ask Siri “Turn on VoiceOver.” - The VoiceOver modifier key (VO):
Control+Optiontogether, orCaps Lock. - Perform the default action on the selected item:
VO+Space. - Open the rotor (jump by element type — headings, links, form controls):
VO+U. - Turn on single-key Quick Nav:
VO+Q. Then pressHfor next heading, or1–6for a specific heading level.
That’s most of what a first pass requires. WebAIM is explicit that this is enough to be useful — no one should be expected to learn these programs to expert proficiency for a basic check, and becoming a true expert user can even make you worse at spotting barriers, since you stop noticing the friction a new user would hit.
What to actually check on your site
Run this on a real product page and your checkout flow — not just the homepage, since that’s rarely where the highest-stakes problems live for an e-commerce site.
- Turn on the screen reader and try to shop with your eyes closed. Can you tell what page you’re on? Can you find the main navigation?
- Listen to the product name and price get read out. Does the price get announced as a price, or as an unlabeled string of numbers? Is a “Sale” or “20% off” badge communicated only by color, with nothing read aloud?
- Tab to the “Add to Cart” button and listen to its name. It should say something like “Add to Cart, button” — not just “button,” and not an image filename.
- Jump heading-to-heading (
Hin NVDA, or Quick Nav in VoiceOver) down the page. Do the headings describe the actual sections in a sensible order? Headings that don’t exist, or skip around illogically, make it much harder to get an overview or jump to what you want. - Go through checkout field by field. Does each field announce a label (“Email address, edit text”), or just “edit text” with no name? An unlabeled field is one of the most common — and most completely blocking — issues a screen reader pass turns up.
- Listen for anything that doesn’t get announced at all. If adding an item to your cart shows only a visual toast that fades out, with nothing read aloud, that’s a real, common gap — sighted users see it; screen reader users may never know it happened.
If any of this is hard to follow purely by ear, that’s data, not a personal failing — it likely means a real visitor using a screen reader would hit the same wall.
What this pass won’t catch
A twenty-minute self-check is a starting point, not a full audit. It’s not fool-proof: WebAIM cautions that someone without screen reader experience may misjudge unfamiliar-but-fine behavior as broken, or the reverse — miss something genuinely blocking because they didn’t know to expect it. It also won’t systematically cover every WCAG 2.1 AA success criterion or catch every keyboard-trap edge case, and it doesn’t test things like color contrast at all. Treat it as a way to build intuition and catch obvious problems, not as a substitute for a full manual and automated review.
FAQ
Do I need to buy JAWS to test my site properly? No. NVDA (Windows, free) and VoiceOver (Mac, built in) are both widely used and, per WebAIM, roughly equal in web-content capability to JAWS for a manual check. JAWS’s cost makes it impractical for a self-test even though it remains common among daily users.
How long does a basic screen reader pass take? A focused pass on one or two key pages — a product page and checkout — takes fifteen to twenty minutes once you know the handful of commands above.
Is this the same as an accessibility audit? No. This is a fast, self-serve first look. A full audit combines automated scanning with a systematic manual review — keyboard navigation, screen reader semantics, and every applicable WCAG 2.1 AA success criterion — verified by a person, not sampled by ear on a couple of pages.
Get a full audit, not just a self-check
A self-test is a good first step, but it’s necessarily partial — a full Quietramp audit pairs an automated scan with a systematic manual review of your whole site, including the keyboard and screen reader testing this guide only samples. See a real sample report of what that looks like, or check pricing — $890 one-time, $99/month if you want ongoing re-checks after fixes ship.
This is educational content about technical accessibility testing practice, not legal advice. Meeting WCAG 2.1 AA does not guarantee legal compliance with the ADA or any other law, and nothing here should be read as a compliance guarantee. Consult qualified counsel for legal risk questions.
This article was drafted by an AI content system as part of Quietramp’s AI-operated, human-reviewed content process, and is reviewed for accuracy before publication — the same disclosure we make about how our audits are produced.