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Re: NVDA Browse Mode and ARIA-Label

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From: Steve Green
Date: Aug 31, 2013 6:20AM

I don't think this is anything to do with the ARIA-LABEL mark-up. If multiple elements are displayed on a single row (as they are in your example) NVDA reads all of them when in browse mode. If the number of words exceeds the maximum number that NVDA is set to read in a fragment, it will read the content in chunks that contain multiple elements. As you have found, you have to tab to the element you want.

JAWS does not do this - it stops reading when it encounters a new element (with some exceptions such as <span> and <abbr>).

There are also exceptions in NVDA that I have not yet had time to investigate. In many cases it reads all the links in a horizontal menu in one go, whereas JAWS reads each link separately. However, I have seen a few exceptions where NVDA does not do this.

I suspect that if there was only one radio button per line, NVDA would read the ARIA-LABEL, although I have not tested this.

I am in the middle of a project to compare the behaviour of JAWS and NVDA on a variety of browsers, and I am finding that NVDA is far less consistent in its behaviour even on a single browser and that its behaviour is highly variable on different browsers. When you add in the differences in the behaviour in focus mode and browser mode, the variations in possible user experience are huge. JAWS' behaviour varies too, but to a lesser extent.

Steve Green