What is a screen reader?

A screen reader navigates a document or page by its structure rather than its appearance, announcing headings, links, tables and form fields in the order the underlying markup declares. That dependency is the whole reason accessibility is a structural problem rather than a visual one: content that looks correctly organized but declares no headings is announced as an undifferentiated stream, and a table without header cells is read as a sequence of unrelated values. A document that presents structure only through font size and position is effectively unreadable. Centralpoint's conversion of content into structured form during ingestion is what makes remediation possible — heading hierarchy, reading order, table relationships and alternative text become addressable record properties rather than visual conventions. Because accessibility state is then a property of the record, compliance is reportable across the estate and enforceable at publication rather than audited periodically.