So by default the feed on the home page auto-updates, suddenly making new posts appear. This causes various issues with screen readers. Here's a post explaining how to turn it off with a workaround.
https://lemmy.world/post/390268
So to tl;dr, what I had to do is: On the home page, (e.g. http://lemmy.world), select any of the sorting options (e.g. subscribed only) by tabbing into the radio select item and hitting space. This then changes the address bar to something like
https://lemmy.world/home/data_type/Post/listing_type/Subscribed/sort/Active/page/1
Changing the 1 at the end to a 0 will bring up the same page, without auto updating. I also found that honestly the URL is a more convenient interface to the sorting options, at least for me.
Hope anyone finds this useful.