WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: How do users of physical Assistive Technologies access screen reader shortcuts

for

From: JP Jamous
Date: Oct 7, 2016 8:12AM

Wowe! They knew what they were doing but did not want to admit it. Shove it under the carpet.

I cannot blame the folks I was dealing with, because they were from a developing country. They had no clue what A11Y was nor how to handle screen readers.

They stuffed the code to ensure they were covering everything. Yet, it became a nightmare.

-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Jonathan Avila
Sent: Friday, October 7, 2016 8:56 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] How do users of physical Assistive Technologies access screen reader shortcuts

>The mindset here is that screen readers only work with the TAB key.

I've run into crazy issues like this before as well.. For example, one large International organization decided in it's products to add the accessible name to input fields when the field received focus. So of course there was no accessible name in virtual cursor/browse mode and the timing was buggy when tabbing to the field and the name often wasn't announced. They also put everything in the focus order and argued that the app didn't need to allow the user access with virtual cursor/browse mode in order to be Section 508 compliant. Of course it also required the user turning off the virtual cursor with JAWS because in that mode title attributes are announced from other elements like divs, etc. There were also numerous other issues such as unlabeled graphics, etc. When I mentioned to the agency that they had purchased a non-section 508 compliant app I was asked to never say that again and to drop the issue.

Jonathan


-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Dan Smith
Sent: Thursday, October 06, 2016 10:27 PM
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] How do users of physical Assistive Technologies access screen reader shortcuts

Thanks both for your replies. Rakesh, those sticky keys sound great. :)

JP Jamous, perhaps we are working with the same client ;-) The mindset here is that screen readers only work with the TAB key. These guys have tunnel vision for the deadline, so no structural changes are allowed and everything goes into the uncommented blackbox of JavaScript. A small example is that anything semantic is removed with aria-hidden and a negative tab-index, then they use 300 positive tab indices and JavaScript key events on divs to duplicate everything with aria-describedby. Good luck using that with Rotor! ;-)

Cheers,
Dan