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Re: visual scrolling with screen readers

for

From: David Engebretson Jr
Date: Oct 13, 2018 11:26AM

Actually, that really helps. It might be that the content is not visible...

I don't have specific examples at this point but I've seen it happen on
SiteImprove and on JIRA. I'll keep better track of this in future and be
better prepared to analyze the issue now.

Thanks so much,
David


-----Original Message-----
From: Léonie Watson
Sent: Saturday, October 13, 2018 4:11 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List ; David Engebretson Jr
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] visual scrolling with screen readers

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--

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