WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Is VoiceOver more similar to NVDA or JAWS with respect to the accessibility tree?

for

From: glen walker
Date: Jun 3, 2020 8:38AM

Not in functionality or features but in how it interprets the accessibility
tree. For example,

First Name <input>

If a label is not associated with an input element, NVDA will not "guess"
at what the label should be. It won't say anything except "edit". Both
JAWS and VoiceOver (Mac and iOS) will say "First Name" for the label even
though it's not in the accessibility tree.

So for testing purposes, NVDA is more "pure" and can help find a11y bugs.
I've known JAWS has some built in heuristics for fixing bad html but wasn't
sure what VoiceOver had built in. With respect to input labels, JAWS and
VoiceOver seem to work the same. Are there other heuristics that are
similar between the two?

One of the reasons I'm asking is because a customer wants to do all their
testing on the Mac. I was trying to convince them that there might be bugs
that are missed because VoiceOver is trying to be nice but I wasn't sure
how many things VO is nice about. Is there a list of heuristics that both
JAWS and VoiceOver have to overcome bad html?