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

for

From: Léonie Watson
Date: Jul 2, 2015 11:38PM

> From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ]
> On Behalf Of Christopher Koeber
> Sent: 03 July 2015 00:41
> This is an internal site for the client; they'll always be late installing the latest
> version of anything. Running Windows 7 but they won't be upgrading from IE
> 8 or JAWS 11 anytime soon.
>
> May I ask, what are the elements that JAWS 11 supports well that you know
> of?

Jaws 11 was released in 2009 [1]. It was the first version to support Windows 7, but it took until Jaws 12 for Windows 7 support to stabilise.

Jaws 12 was the first version to support ARIA in 2010. Whilst Jaws 11 and IE8 are the tools of choice within your organisation, this effectively rules out using ARIA on your site.

Jaws 11 does not support HTML5 either. Essentially you'll need to stick to HTML4.01 for the most part. If you decide to use things like the HTML5 sectioning elements (like main, article, nav etc.) anyway, Jaws will just degrade gracefully and treat them like divs. Anything more exciting in HTML5 than that is a lost cause with Jaws 11/IE8.

Léonie.
[1] https://www.freedomscientific.com/About/News/Article/66

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