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Re: JAWS 18 - safe to upgrade

for

From: Steve Green
Date: Jun 16, 2017 12:44AM

I have found two new issues with JAWS 18 that can render websites completely unusable under certain circumstances. I don't know how widespread this problem will be, but it has affected two of the three websites I have been testing in the last two weeks.

In one case, it appears that the problem is caused by a new heuristic that JAWS 18 is using. The other may also be a new heuristic or it may just be a bug. In both cases, JAWS 17 works fine.

The first issue occurs when a textbox or textarea is inside a <div> element that has any "aria" attribute or a "tabindex" attribute. JAWS concatenates all the text (including labels for other form controls) and uses it as the label for the textbox or textarea. This can be fixed by changing the <div> element to a <section> element.

The other issue requires two factors to occur. First, there needs to be a <label> element with no "for" attribute - obviously this should not happen but it seems to be quite common. Secondly, there needs to be a form control that does not have an explicit label. In the website I was testing, there was a JavaScript combobox replacement in which the options were list items with role="option", which was sufficient to cause this bug / behaviour. When these two factors occur, JAWS uses the contents of the <label> element as the label for the form controls even though they are completely unrelated. In my case it meant that all the options in the combobox appeared to be the same.

I have built trivially simple test pages to verify that these issues are not specific to my clients' websites. I am therefore surprised that I can't find any mention of them on the web, since they must affect a lot of websites.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd