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Re: JAWS 11 and text + image link combination

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From: KINNUNEN, DANIEL
Date: Feb 3, 2010 4:30PM

Dallas, this is a "feature" in JAWS 11.

If you open the JAWS configuration manager, select Set Options, then
open HTML Options and go to the Links tab, you will see the first option
is "Filter Duplicate Links". That option is selected by default.

Begin JAWS help description ---

Select this check box so that JAWS only announces the text link when two
consecutive Web page links, typically a graphical link and text link,
point to the same URL. This check box is selected by default.

--- end JAWS help text.

The help text goes on to say that if you arrow through the text or if
you use Insert+F7 to list the links, you will hear both the text link
and the image alt text. (This part of the help text is somewhat
inaccurate, so I did not include it in the quote above.)

It seems that it might make more sense to ignore the alt text only if it
is the same as the link text... but it appears to be related to the
target URL instead.

Hope that helps,
Dan Kinnunen

-----Original Message-----
From: Despain, Dallas
Sent: Wednesday, February 03, 2010 4:54 PM
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: [WebAIM] (no subject)

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