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Re: testing with JAWS and NVDA

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From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Apr 11, 2013 5:39AM

Can you post the page you are testing?
I am just curious in what situation this happened.
What is the Jaws verbosity setting (it should not make a difference of
course, but strange things do happen).

If this is a problem with one screen reader, I do try to get back to
the manufacturer with an explanation of the problem.
Of course, in most cases, it seems like a wasted effort, but when I do
have time (it happens), I do my best, I have even applied to become a
Jaws tester and am waiting on the reply, and I have filed a bug or two
with NVDA.
The most recent Jaws bug I noticed, for instance, is that Jaws (at
least Jaws 14 with IE9) stops automatically reading the
aria-describedby attribute on a field when verbosity is set to
"advanced". FS has confirmed the bug, at least in the context I
submitted it, and I hope to see a fix for it.

Web accessibility is complex and fascinating.
The standards and best practices help guide the authoring and create
consistency, to some degree, with the browsers, and a link between the
browsers and the Assistive Technology being used, but of course not
always 100%. There are both bugs and mistakes, and also standards
leave some room for interpretation and each assistive technology can
have slightly different take on accessibility based on what they
believe works best for the user.

Then there is the end users, how they interact with their assistive
technology, and to what extent they can take advantage of it and
understand how to use it, but that's a different thread altogether.
So, back to the original point, if you have time and think this is a
bug, definitely file it with the Assistive Technology vendor, feel
free to post it to the list if you are allowed to do so.
Cheers
-B

On 4/11/13, Karlen Communications < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> We depend on the standards and make sure that the code or tagging is to the
> standard. Even with a technology that might read things correctly when you
> start a document or web page, the mechanical tool/screen reader or
> Text-to-Speech may grow tired and read things incorrectly. We can't define
> accessibility as being AT centric and we can't fail digital content if
> there
> is a glitch or bug in the AT. This would mean testing every page against
> every setting and version of both AT and browsers for "compliance."
>
> I use AT and I do use it to test but if the code is right and the AT is
> reading it incorrectly, this is not a failure of the coding or tagging or
> the accessibility of a document, we need to be able to separate the quirks
> of the AT from our testing and what we define is "accessible."
>
> Is the coding or tagging correct for the content?
>
> Cheers, Karen
>
>