I’m a longtime ChatGPT user and I happen to be blind. I use software called a screen reader to access my computer. In short, this software reads aloud the contents of the screen as I control it with various keyboard gestures. For a screen reader to work effectively on a web application, that app needs to have been designed with accessibility best practices in mind.
That’s where my kudos comes in. A couple weeks ago when I visited the ChatGPT site, I found that it had seemingly received a major accessibility overhaul! The team had added markup for ARIA labels and other semantic markup such that a screen reader can give the user much better and more descriptive verbal output about what’s on the screen. This includes labels for the buttons that appear under chat responses, like “Good Response,” “Read Aloud,” “Regenerate” etc, as well as heading elements above each user message and ChatGPT reply. That was especially welcomed, as it makes it so much easier to go up in the chat list and read or interact with messages. They’ve also made it so that you hear a verbal indicator while ChatGPT is still generating a response, and another verbal cue when that response is finished. It then starts reading aloud ChatGPT’s response once completed. Very cool!
I just want to thank the web team for their fantastic efforts and these super helpful enhancements! I tried writing a Chrome extension some months ago that attempted to do some of these things, but it was a bit jenky and broke whenever they pushed updates to the site, lol - so seeing these ideas being implemented on their end is like my accessibility wishlist being enacted!
Thanks again, and keep up the great work! I know accessibility may not affect a huge portion of your users, but for the ones it does impact, that impact is more immense and meaningful than you’ll ever know.