WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: JAWS and Describedby

for

From: Bryan Garaventa
Date: Sep 14, 2016 2:25PM

This is likely a JAWS bug when trying to handle IE11, which has lots of historical issues with handling events like this.

To summarize the events that happen, when an element receives focus, its Name and Description is detected and announced. Name is the accessible name, and Description in this case is referenced using aria-describedby.

Also, if you dynamically change the element that is referenced using aria-describedby or change the ID that it points to while focus remains on that form field or element, the browser fires a description_changed event which is supposed to be detected by the AT and cause this information to be announced. This is also important for cases when there is a delay between when the element receives focus and when the tooltip is rendered, which may not actually be in the DOM until a second or two after, making it necessary to set aria-describedby after this element receives focus.

Unfortunately these events have never fired correctly in IE11 and likely never will now, so JAWS has to have hard coded detection mechanisms in place to try and do this manually as a result.

So typing in a form field by itself should not cause aria-describedby to be announced repeatedly by JAWS, as long as the Description remains static.

If you want a situation like the following instead for typing into a form field, so that dynamic help messages are announced automatically as you type:
http://whatsock.com/tsg/Coding%20Arena/Inline%20Form%20Field%20Validation%20and%20Dynamic%20Help%20Tooltips/Dynamic%20Help%20Tooltip/demo.htm

Then at present a live region using aria-live=polite is your best bet.

If what you want is just one Description however, then I recommend filing a JAWS bug with steps to reproduce the behavior in IE11, since this is likely just a repetetive announcement bug.




Bryan Garaventa
Accessibility Fellow
SSB BART Group, Inc.
<EMAIL REMOVED>
415.624.2709 (o)
www.SSBBartGroup.com