WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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Re: screen reader versions for testing

for

From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Oct 30, 2016 5:20AM

We generally test with NVDA (current - 1) with Firefox (current -2).
NVDA is free, open source (so available to the general user at no
cost), has good visual tools to help developers and does not hide
accessibility issues like Jaws does (I appreciate Jaws trying to fill
in the gap for the end users but it makes it a bad tool for testing).
Since I am heavily involved in development and testing of contet, I
sanity check it with Jaws and IE, and we try to file bug and work
around the most critical problems we see occurring in that
combination.
For responsive web, we use iOS, latest (because upgrading is easy),
iPhone 6 in portrait mode (testing in portrait and landscape on phone
and tablet adds a lot of overhead very quickly).
Generally, banks recommend that users upgrade to latest versions of
browsers for security reasons.
We are looking into testing at least key pages with screen
magnification and speech recognition as well.

Of course we focus primarily to make sure our code validates and that
our ARIA, when we use it, is correct.
Cheers




On 10/29/16, JP Jamous < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> Here we test with the latest versions of JAWS/Internet Explorer,
> NVDA/Firefox and Voiceover/Safari.
>
> It makes it a bit hard to find the happy medium as all 3 screen readers
> render HTML markup differently. To achieve the happy medium, we try to focus
> on proper semantic whenever we can. Sometimes that is not possible and we
> notice that NVDA and Voiceover tend to behave similarly, but JAWS is
> different since it drills deeper into the markup.
>
> We do test every now and then with older versions of the 3 screen readers in
> case we run into an issue. As a good example, aria-describedby and
> aria-labelledby were not supported with Voiceover on iOS 10. We tested our
> code against iOS 9.4 and found that it worked fine. That was when we
> realized that it was a bug on behalf of Apple.
>
>