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

for

From: Léonie Watson
Date: Jul 2, 2015 3:36PM

> From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ]
> On Behalf Of Christopher Koeber
> Sent: 02 July 2015 21:33
[...]

> 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.
>

This is because IE8 has little or no support for ARIA. Consequently, the versions of Jaws that were contemporary to IE8 had no ARIA support to speak of.

It is also worth noting that FS withdrew support for IE (along with Windows XP) last year. If you're using Jaws 16, it's possible that IE8 support has deteriorated with that version of Jaws.

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

I haven't come across this behaviour in Jaws. Can you point to an example where this problem occurs? Can you also explain what you mean by "stops reading"?

[...]

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

Use code that is supported in all versions, or use code that degrades gracefully in older browsers. Jaws does its own thing with IE to some extent, but much of what a screen reader supports is based on what the browser supports.

>
> 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.

Which element are you trying to use? The answer will vary depending on the element in question.

For example, Jaws does not announce the title attribute on anything but form fields and iframes by default. It can be configured to announce the title on other interactive elements (like links), but few users ever change this configuration setting.

Last time I checked, Jaws (and NVDA) did not support aria-label on non-interactive elements, only on natively interactive elements like links and form controls.

If you're trying to use both title and aria-label on form controls, then you also need to be aware of the accessible name computation that determines which of these things is used as the control's accessible name [1].

If you need to support IE8, then stick to native HTML as much as possible. It has the best support in older browsers, and thus in newer browsers as well.

Léonie.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/accname-aam-1.1/


--
Léonie Watson - Senior accessibility engineer
@LeonieWatson @PacielloGroup PacielloGroup.com