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Re: Dialog boxeson NVDA

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From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Feb 8, 2017 11:48AM

NVDA's behavior, to automatically go into application mode when focus
is moved into content with role="dialog" has often been discussed.
As far as I know NVDA is the only screen reader to go into application
mode when focus is moved to a dialog.

The ARIA 1.1 spec for the dialog role:
http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-1.1/#dialog
has actually added an explicit note
"In the description of this role, the term "web application" does not
refer to the application role, which specifies specific assistive
technology behaviors."
that seems to indicate that screen readers should not switch to forms mode.

Looking at NVDA's Github, particularly issue 5826
https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/issues/5826
confirms my suspicion that the NVDA developers have decided that NVDA
should go into application mode in dialogs and are not budging from
that stance.

I personally disagree with that decision, I think it presents a much
worse experience for the users, but these are awesome guys, they have
the data, and it is their software (and NVDA is a truly amazing screen
reader).

But I do not advice people to hack around this by using
role="document" inside dialogs because of the way one screen reader
vendor interprets the spec.
If it causes problems for the users, the users should talk directly to
that vendor.
The problem can be solved either by the vendor changing the way the
software operates, or the users get better training on how to set
their own preferences or switch between modes.
The developer should only be concerned with using the right HTML
elements or, if not possible, ARIA roles and attributes for coding the
content.
When they start implementing hacks for one screen reader it can
present issues in other screen readers.
Cheers
-B


On 2/8/17, Jonathan Avila < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>> As I said role="dialog" takes NVDA user to focus mode directly. Developer
>> can remove the role dialog and replace with role="document". With this
>> NVDA does not take the user to focus mode, it will stay in browse mode.
>
> I would generally not recommend using role of document instead of dialog or
> use it within dialogs. Role of region could be used with an aria-label or
> aria-labelledby as an alternative if dialog is misbehaving with some
> assistive technology.
>
> Jonathan
>
> Jonathan Avila
> Chief Accessibility Officer
> SSB BART Group
> <EMAIL REMOVED>
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