WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: jaws support of aria

for

From: Bryan Garaventa
Date: Aug 9, 2013 12:46PM

Thanks. There appear to be some discrepancies in the doc for devs to be
aware of.

The role Dialog states
"This role will be announced only when a child of the dialog gets focus, and
will not appear in the virtual buffer."

This is incorrect. The content does appear in the virtual buffer when
arrowing, but does correctly restrict focus to Applications Mode when focus
is set within the container. However, this only works in JAWS 12 and 13 in
IE, but no longer does so in JAWS 14. Now, in JAWS 14, only the region is
announced and does nothing else. You can get the same effect by adding
role=region and aria-label="dialog" to the container for the same feedback
in JAWS.

The role Presentation states
"This role indicates that a feature of a Web page exists for visual
formatting only. Therefore, JAWS ignores objects with this role. (Known to
work in Firefox.)"

This is incorrect. JAWS removes the role of an element that has
role=presentation, but does not ignore it's textual content. So if you put
role=presentation on an H2 element for example, JAWS would ignore the
heading aspect, so you could not use 'h' to jump to that element, but the
textual content within the heading would still be announced when arrowing.
Only aria-hidden removes an element entirely from the accessibility tree.

The role Tree states
"When in the virtual buffer, JAWS may show only one item of a tree control.
This allows the user to navigate past the tree quickly."

There is currently a very large bug in JAWS 13 and 14 where this
functionality is broken. You can see an example of this at
http://whatsock.com/tsg/Coding%20Arena/ARIA%20Trees/Tree%20(External%20XML)/demo.htm
If you press Insert+F5 for a list of form fields using JAWS12, you will see
only 1 form field. If you do the same in JAWS13(64bt) and JAWS14, you will
see 5. Also arrowing will make you traverse through all items. Hopefully
this will be fixed soon though.



----- Original Message -----
From: "Jennison Asuncion" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
To: < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Sent: Thursday, August 08, 2013 2:27 PM
Subject: [WebAIM] jaws support of aria


> Hi,
>
> I came across this document (downloadable Word file) on the Freedom
> Scientific website called JAWS Support for ARIA
> that I thought some here might find of interest
> http://www.freedomscientific.com/PDF/visionloss/manuals/DevDoc/JAWS-ARIA-Support.doc.
>
>
> Jennison
> Jennison Mark Asuncion
> Co-Director, Adaptech Research Network http://www.adaptech.org
> LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/in/jennison
> Follow me on Twitter http://www.twitter.com/jennison
> Accessibility Camp Toronto http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeP5Kl4GDgA
> > >