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Re: AJAX accessibility issue

for

From: John Martyn DoItBlind.com
Date: Mar 22, 2012 9:21AM

Can you try a forced screen refresh with JAWS key + escape and see if that
does anything. I have encountered some pages like this and the screen
refresh worked in some cases.
John Martyn

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Ritz, Courtney L.
(GSFC-7500)
Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2012 7:48 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List ( <EMAIL REMOVED> )
Subject: [WebAIM] AJAX accessibility issue

Hi all,

Apologies if this topic has already been discussed on-list. Because it's a
rather last-minute issue, I haven't had time to dig through the archives.

We have a Web application here that uses some AJAX in at least one Web form.
I can't link to the Web app because it's password-protected and behind our
firewall, sorry. In this form, the user selects an item, which causes some
new form fields to appear for that selected item. As a JAWS user, when I
select one of these items, I get no feedback whatsoever that anything has
occurred at all.

The developer is currently trying some of the suggestions demonstrated on
the Juicy Studios site. While they work, they require me to turn off the
JAWS virtual PC cursor in order to hear the notification that the action has
taken place. To me, while this is technically doable, it requires extra
steps that the average JAWS user here isn't going to wish to bother with.
Not only that, I don't know how or if this works with other screen readers.

Are there any better solutions to this that I can suggest to the developer,
or is the best solution to find a non-AJAX method for performing these
functions? Whatever we go with has to be able to be considered Section 508
compliant, obviously.

Thanks much.

Courtney