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Wisconsin Jobs Site with JAWS or NVDA in IE and Chrome

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From: Kelly Ford
Date: Jun 3, 2018 1:07PM

Hi,



From time to time I'll notice differences in how different screen readers
present web pages in the various browsers. That's not overly surprising.
Today, however, I had probably the most striking difference I've personally
ever encountered when looking up something for a friend on a Wisconsin jobs
web site.



The site is at http://wisc.jobs.



In Chrome, using both JAWS and NVDA, a big and probably most important part
of the web page was missing from what the screen readers presented. Namely,
the entire search feature.



In Internet Explorer both screen readers presented a table with the
different input fields for conducting a job search. This was not available
at all in Chrome with the default experience of either screen reader.



In Chrome, if I turned off the screen reader web reading mode (Virtual PC in
JAWS and Browse mode in NVDA) and tabbed through the page, I did get to what
I believe was the search feature. Both screen readers encountered several
silent tab stops. The number of these was equivalent to the number of input
fields I was able to find in IE. The fact that these tab stops were
completely silent in both screen readers was an interesting wrinkle. If an
edit box or other control is missing a label, I'd still expect to hear
"edit" and such.



Also, if I had the web reading mode off and asked Chrome to Inspect the
current element on the different silent tab stops, the element tree opened
to different input fields, which also leads me to believe the search
controls are present in Chrome in general.



I'm curious if this difference repros for anyone else. I've tried on a
couple machines. Also, any theories on what could contribute to this? I'm
still hunting through the page source and am curious if others have
encountered a situation like this on other sites?



For what it is worth, in Firefox and Edge, both screen readers and Narrator
also present the search fields.



Kelly