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

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From: Bryan Garaventa
Date: Jul 3, 2015 4:38PM

One thing of note, I had to evaluate a government product a while back using only JAWS11 within IE8, and there is some early attempts at ARIA support built into it, but this is very unreliable.

E.G http://www.freedomscientific.com/Support/TechnicalSupport/Bulletin/1404

The use of role=application and role=dialog/alertdialog causes major accessibility issues, and should be avoided unless absolutely necessary. ARIA Menu constructs do work if 'roving tabindex' is used instead of aria-activedescendant, and requires that the container be surrounded using role=application to invoke the correct browse modality when focus is set to a menuitem. ARIA Buttons work, but toggles do not, at least, not reliably, especially when contained within a container with role=toolbar. Most other ARIA constructs work partially and often cause more trouble than they are worth, because they convey enough to change what a screen reader user hears, but not enough to make them work accessibly.


-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Léonie Watson
Sent: Thursday, July 02, 2015 10:39 PM
To: 'WebAIM Discussion List'
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Developing Accessible Pages Using JAWS (11 and IE 8+)

> 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

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