WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

discrepancy with frames

for

From: John Goldthwaite
Date: Feb 15, 2002 11:13AM

Is he using Internet Explorer 5? JAWS works much better with IE since it
uses Microsoft Active Accessibility to provide more info JAWS. Does he know
what the keystrokes to use with Explorer are? - those are documented in the
JAWS Help Topics under Popular Applications with JFW. JAWS is programmable
and can have a script for each application program that provides additional
reading functions that are bound to keystroke combinations. For Internet
Explorer, Control-Tab moves from Frame to Frame and Insert-F9 pops up a list
of the frames. The JAWS script for Netscape doesn't have any functions to
handle frames.

I tried using your page with JAWS and it seems to work fairly well. I can
move from frame to frame with no problem. But I did find the sample lesson
had some problems. If I was using the arrow keys to read down the page, I
had to click on the combo boxes to get the focus on them. If I used Tab it
would take me to the combo box and other controls but it did not read the
surrounding text. That meant as you moved with the Tab key you only heard
the type of control and not the text of the question and answer. Using up
and down arrow it reads the question and answer but you have to move across
word by word to find the control and click on it(or use the JAWS keypad /
for left mouse click).

-----Original Message-----


Date: 14 Feb 2002 13:53:25 -0600
From: Chris Keller < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: discrepancy with frames and 508 standards

I have heard and read many times that websites in frames comply with the W3C
508 guidelines. However, we had a blind student, CJ, test our courses which
are using frames with his screen reader, Jaws (version 4.0, I believe), and
he could not access our courses. We are naming our frames and can't figure
out why the student can't access our courses. We have done our own tests
and validate CJ's findings that our frames setup is inaccessible with his
Jaws software. He gave a presentation to our 20 full time employees and
adamantly argued that frame sites are inaccessible and that we should design
in tables. Here is an example course:
http://ce.byu.edu/courses/univ/488025350004/public/start.htm

Could anyone please address this discrepancy or give us suggestions? Thank
you.

Sincerely,

Chris Keller
Quality Assurance Supervisor
BYU Center for Instructional Design
(801) 378-7686 office





---
To subscribe, unsubscribe, or view list archives,
visit http://www.webaim.org/discussion/