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From: Despain, Dallas
Date: Feb 3, 2010 3:54PM

Hi everybody,

I'm a developer trying to make sure that our web-based products are as accessible as possible. We have run into a discrepancy between jaws 10 and jaws 11.

The "problem" is that in jaws 11, when you use the tab key to focus on a link that contains both an image and text (the image does have alt text) jaws only reads the text, not the alt text of the image. However if you use the arrow keys to read the link, both the alt text and link text are announced as expected.

Interestingly, the order is important. That is, if the text comes first the text is announced but not the alt text. If the which comes first, just the image alt text is announced.

If you'd like to see this in action, it can be observed in example 7 of the following webaim.org page: http://webaim.org/techniques/alttext/#functional

The link in question reads "download the employment application" and also contains an image with alt text= "sample image"

So my question for you is: is this a known issue? I'm assuming that since I cannot reproduce this in jaws 10, this behavior must be new and unexpected but common. I'm not exactly sure how we could fix it, since our HTML is correct. Which is more common, the tab key or the arrow keys? Does this issue cause problems for jaws users?

Thank you very much for any insight you could offer.

Sincerely,

Dallas Despain
RightNow Technologies