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RE: Reading OPTGROUP with JAWS

for

From: Cohen, Lisa A.
Date: Apr 17, 2002 12:36PM


Paul, thank you very much for the suggested techniques.

Andrew, I'm confused...

Does JAWS say the group values (OPTGROUP) for you? Which keystrokes get him
to move to (and say) another OPTGROUP?

Also, I am running IE 5.5 and it doesn't show the OPTGROUP at all... you
see it in bold? Haven't tried 6.0 because most of my government users will
not have it for a while.

Lisa

-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew Kirkpatrick [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ]
Sent: Wednesday, April 17, 2002 2:45 PM
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: Re: Reading OPTGROUP with JAWS


Can you define "support" in this case? Netscape 4.7, Opera 5, IE5.5 & 6,
and MacIE5& 5.1 (undoubtedly there are others, these are the ones I checked)
all support optgroup. I've attached a sample file. When viewing this
example in Ie, JAWS reads the options fine.

Mac IE does what I imagine people consider "supporting" optgroup. When the
combo box is opened, four items appear, some with sub-menus. Very clean
visually.

Win IE makes the optgroup name bold and not selectable in its
implementation. A user with a screen reader will hear the optgroup name for
each sub-item, but the information is available. It would be great if
screen readers supported an auitory experience similar to the visual
experience in MacIE.

AWK

On 4/17/02 2:04 PM, Paul Bohman ( <EMAIL REMOVED> ) wrote:



The only technology that I'm aware of that supports optgroup is Netscape
6.x. I wish others did, but I don't think they do. Maybe the screen reader
Emacspeak for Unix/Linux does, but I'm not familiar enough with it to know.
Emacspeak has support for everything it seems, so I wouldn't be surprised if
it supports this feature.




-----Original Message-----
From: Cohen, Lisa A. [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ]
Sent: Wednesday, April 17, 2002 11:38 AM
To: WebAIM forum ( <EMAIL REMOVED> )
Subject: Reading OPTGROUP with JAWS


Hello,
(Apologies for cross-posting... desperately need an answer!)
I need to code a very long listbox in an HTML form. The HTML 4 spec shows
an example of using OPTGROUP to group OPTIONS within SELECT tags. But this
does not appear to work with JAWS (nor does IE 5.5 do anything with
OPTGROUP).




--
Andrew Kirkpatrick, Technical Project Coordinator
CPB/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media
125 Western Ave.
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E-mail: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Web site: ncam.wgbh.org

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