WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: visual scrolling with screen readers

for

From: Date: Oct 13, 2018 5:11AM

On 12/10/2018 20:48, David Engebretson Jr wrote:
> What I really want is for sighted people to see (at all times) where
> focus is in the screen reader.  If focus is on the virtual cursor
> somewhere off of the visual presentation then they are confused.
> There's enough confusion with regards to interaction with a screen
> reader.  *smile*  No use adding more confusion when screen reader focus
> is somewhere off the visual perspective.

I haven't been following this thread carefully, but as I understand it,
the capability you're looking for is available in most screen readers.

Jaws should indicate which element it's focused on (either by tab focus
or virtual cursor focus), by highlighting it in green.

NVDA has a plugin that will put a border around the element that
currently has focus [1]. VoiceOver also puts a border around the element
that has focus.

Narrator does it differently. If you enable Dev Mode (whilst Narrator is
running), it blacks out everything on screen except the thing that has
Narrator focus. Of all the techniques, this one makes teaching people
how to understand screen reader focus the easiest I think.

The problem is what happens when the thing the screen reader is focused
on is not available visually. By definition, it can't then be
highlighted, and routing the cursor to that point on the page will
apparently fail.

It's this mismatch (amongst other things) that is the reason I tend to
advise against using off-screen content whenever possible. Not that this
helps answer your question I realise!

If you can share an example of the problem you're experiencing, that
might help throw up some possible solutions though.

Léonie.
[1] https://addons.nvda-project.org/addons/focusHighlight.en.html--

--
@LeonieWatson @ <EMAIL REMOVED> Carpe diem