Screen Reader only working on Text & Images

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Hi there Figma Community

I am currently working on a project, where one of the clients is a blind woman. For this I was looking into the accessibility features from Figma and was delighted, that Figma itself works with general screen reader.

I noticed now, that screen reader only works with texts & images, but as we are still in a very abstract phase of the prototyping process, we have a lot of things like “lines as stand in for text blocks” etc. As far as I can see, I can’t manually mark something as “read this element in a screen reader” so it would be able to “see” the element to be read out loud and read the title of a marked frame/shape/etc.

Or does anyone know about an option that I didn’t realise is there?

If there isn’t an option like this, it would be great to have something like this in the feature, as for now prototypes already need to be very hi-fi to actually be able to share with a blind person, which, in my opinion, is too late in the process to create the best solution and test it.

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Hey @Rosina_Brosi, thanks for reaching out!

We have guidance on which elements will be read in the Help Center here:

Right now, one workaround would be to create a component named something like “Standin for final copy” and use instances of it. Its name will be read by the screen reader.

Another option would be to put standin text behind the placeholders, so that it doesn’t show visually. Even if the font is very small the text will still be read by assistive technologies.

For what it’s worth, our accessibility team agrees that it would be better to have explicit controls over what is or isn’t read. Rest-assured, that this is on our radar for improvement in the future.

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