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Re: Seeking input on SC 2.4.7 & Screen Readers

for

From: deborah.kaplan
Date: May 4, 2016 8:09AM


Thank you, Jennifer, for linking to that. For those of you who, like me,
are sighted accessibility professionals, you might find Focus Highlight
invaluable. I never really understood the way screen reader focusing
and buffers work until I installed that plug-in. Now I only barely
understand it, which is better than not understanding at all.

(As a keyboard/voice user, I've also written a Stylish style for Firefox
which always shows the keyboard focus, because I'm exasperated with
offscreen, hidden, or too-subtle to see focus. When I have finished
debugging some weirdness that happened with modals or certain off-screen
or Z-index conditions, I will be happy to share it.)

Deborah Kaplan

On Tue, 3 May 2016, Jennifer Sutton wrote:

> For those who may be unaware, I'll provide the link to the Focus
> Highlight Plugin for NVDA which is the one I believe Jonathan meant when
> he wrote, in part:
>
> "There is a plug-in though for NVDA."
>
>
> I believe this is a link to the most recent version:
>
>
> http://addons.nvda-project.org/addons/focusHighlight.en.html
>
>
> In addition, I'll mention that both JFW and NVDA have ways to display
> the textual representation of what each screen reader is speaking. Using
> this can be faster for those who are not used to listening to
> text-to-speech, and it can also save time, when writing reports, since
> you can "copy and paste." Yes, I realize this may be slightly off-topic,
> but I think many Windows users who have vision and are learning to test
> with a screen reader may not realize that JFW and NVDA can do something
> visually similar to what VO can do on the Mac.
>
>
>
> Best,
>
> Jennifer
>
>
>
> On 5/3/2016 10:52 AM, Jonathan Avila wrote:
>>> However, when I enable JAWS or NVDA, this visible focus is lost.
>> Hi Nicole, with JAWS in virtual cursor mode the focus is not moved to an
> element when you arrow to it -- only when you tab. With NVDA and some other
> screen readers the element is focused when you arrow to it in browse mode. I
> noticed that even though links in IE are focused by NVDA no focus outline
> appears. In Firefox the focus outline does appear on links when you arrow to
> them with NVDA. So what you are experiencing seems like normal behavior --
> perhaps with a bug in how NVDA and IE work. NVDA and IE have some known
> issues and JAWS works this way by design. So as long as the focus indicator
> is shown without AT running and the AT can identify the programmatic focus it
> should be fine. Some ATs provide their own focus indicators based on
> programmatic focus being set but JAWS and NVDA do not. There is a plug-in
> though for NVDA.
>>
>> Jonathan
>>
>> Jonathan Avila
>> Chief Accessibility Officer
>> SSB BART Group
>> <EMAIL REMOVED>
>> 703.637.8957 (Office)
>>
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