WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Javascript animation and screen reader focus

for

From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Sep 3, 2011 12:09AM

Good day to all.

I realized that the issue I elluded to in my last post, really boils
down to problems with Javascript animation (such as carousels, and
other objects), that seem to disrupt screen reader usage, and if there
is a recomended technique to prevent this from happening, either by
somehow telling the screen reader to ignore it, or to hide it fro the
screen reader.
The page I had issues with
http://www.okbeint.is
has a carousel of photos, and two of my screen readers that I have
tested jump around, react sluggishly and the page even crashes in one
of them (though I suspect it could be a Jaws with IE9 issue, perhaps
specific to my computer).
However, the accessible photo carousel at: http://nxtbgthng.com/ does
not do this.
I need to do further testing, and analyzing the code, but a quick
Google search of terms such as "prevent javascript animation moving
screen reader focus" did not yield anything useful.
Is there some one recommended technique that can be used in this scenario?
For Flash there are guidelines that help:
http://webaim.org/techniques/flash/

I'm happy looking at accessible carousels (I remember there was a
topic on it a few weeks back),and test them, but if there is a
universally recommended technique here, it'd be good to be aware of
it.
Thanks to all, and to all a good weekend.
-B