Can I make my website read text to users with assistive technologies (VoiceOver/JAWS), only?

Question

I would like to provide a bit of assistance to blind users by having my website read something to them, briefly. Is this possible?

Answer 1

One way you can provide content that will be read to users using a screen reader (but not shown to sighted users) is by positioning the content using CSS such that it is offscreen.

E.g. Something like:

In CSS:

.screen-reader { 
  position: absolute; 
  left: -10000px; 
  width: 1px; 
  height: 1px; 
  overflow: hidden; 
}

In your HTML:

<p>This text will be read to the screen reader and shown on screen.</p>
<p class="screen-reader">This text will be read to a screen reader but won't show up on screen.</p>

See Techniques for hiding text (at WebAIM) for more info.

Answer 2

This is a web-technology in progress. One I know of is Google Text-To-Speech, but it requires Html 5 to play without clicking/download. Ref: http://weston.ruter.net/projects/google-tts/