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Re: JAWS adds tabindex=-1

for

From: David Farough
Date: May 1, 2015 11:19AM

I have not looked to see if anything has been added to the page in this
case, but I have noticed additional items when tabbing through my banks
bill payment options using Jaws 16 that do not appear with version 15.
It did not occur to me that Jaws might add something to the DOM.

David Farough
(819) 420-8418


>>> "Moore,Michael (DARS)" < <EMAIL REMOVED> > 12:36 PM
Friday, May 01, 2015 >>>
JAWS does not change the code. There are options to filter duplicate
links - thus is JAWS sees "Home" "Home" it will only announce the link
once. You can also tell JAWS to skip repeated navigation - this will
ignore a common nav bar at the top of the page. This one is a bit less
reliable and some users will have a hard time finding search. All of
this is totally under control of the user. There is a FLASH based screen
reader detection script that I have seen used to trigger dynamic changes
in the code - this is usually pretty dangerous and often causes more
trouble than it solves especially since the detection does not work for
all screen readers. A final option that I have seen (SharePoint and
PeopleSoft) is a user selected flag that turns on "Accessibility"
options. This also results in dynamic changes to the code. Best practice
remains to make the code accessible from the beginning rather than bolt
on accessibility later.

Mike Moore
Accessibility Coordinator,
Texas Department of Assistive and Rehabilitative Services
(512) 424-4159 (Office)
(512) 574-0091 (Cell)