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JAWS, Firefox, display: none, input tag

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From: Marco Maertens
Date: May 18, 2010 12:36PM

Hi,

We're having a interesting, but frustrating problem, involving Firefox 3.6, JAWS 11, and UI Tabs.

We have an interface with several tabs, which are hidden and displayed using JavaScript (UI Tabs). Each tab is hidden using display: none CSS and redisplayed using the display:block CSS. Pretty straightforward.

However, if you display the first tab, then display any other tab, then return to the first tab, JAWS will not read out the currently selected (first) tab. Instead, it will read out the previously displayed (but now hidden) tab. And the weird thing is that this only happens is when the content of that tab happens to contain a text input tag. As soon as that input tag is removed, JAWS reads out the tabs exactly as they display on the screen. Other types of input tags, such as checkboxes, do not cause the same odd behavior.

This happens in Firefox but not in IE.

Has anyone seen this or have any idea what's going on? More importantly, is there any fix or workaround?

Thanks in advance for your help,
-Marco.

Marco Maertens
Empathy Lab