Listenability

A web-accessibility usability metric that measures how appropriate a page's rendered text is when read aloud by a screen reader or voice browser — complementary to, and distinct from, raw WCAG conformance. Listenability penalises meaningless or placeholder ALT text (such as 'image' or 'spacer gif'), redundant text that causes screen readers to speak the same label twice near a linked image, and typographic tricks such as visually space-separating characters that break speech-synthesis pronunciation. Proposed by Fukuda et al. in 2005, listenability reflects the insight that markup compliance alone does not guarantee usable speech output — a well-structured page can still be unbearable to listen to if its text renders poorly through a TTS engine.