Full width web pages and screen readers

Question

I work in an office that receives government funding so our website needs to be highly accessible. We are brainstorming ideas for a major site redesign. We kind of like a full width idea, but one employee says that they cause issues with screen readers. Does anyone have any experience of this? If there are any websites out there that can verify this information can you please share the links?

Thanks

Answer 1

As said in the comments, full-width or fixed-width has virtually zero impact on a screen-reader. The only thing a full-width page does is make the content longer visually (since it has more room to expand horizontally). From a screen reader perspective, widths don't really matter. It's just reading the text as if it were on one long line (obviously breaking it up in paragraphs and headings and such changes the way it's read).

That being said, going full-width can actually hurt accessibility b/c long horizontal lines of text are difficult to read. Accessibility is complex and there are a lot of different facets to it to consider.