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Developing Accessible Pages Using JAWS (11 and IE 8+)

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From: Christopher Koeber
Date: Jul 2, 2015 2:32PM

Hello,



I am attempting to develop Section 508 compliant web pages for JAWS 11 and
Internet Explorer 8 (has to be those versions of said applications per
client requirements) and one of the major problems I am having is that I
cannot consistently get screen reader output from JAWS.



With Internet Explorer 10-11+ the various ARIA+ labels are supported along
with reading of DIV tags specially hidden by CSS, thus developing for JAWS
is much easier.



But with Internet Explorer 8 the same set of items are not read at all.



In addition, it seems JAWS (11 at least) will stop reading the page even if
there is one or two HTML markup errors.



So I have two (2) questions:



-

Has anyone found a consistent way to develop for all browsers
(especially older ones) as well as newer ones?
-

Is there a rock-solid no-nonsense table of what JAWS actually reads (in
terms of "title" versus "aria-label", etc.)? What I am looking for is one
label/text setting I can set that JAWS will read without fail on a tag,
other tags seem to be very unreliable.



I hope this find folks well.



Regards,



Christopher Kurtis Koeber

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P: (301) 467-8417