WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

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

for

From: Steve Green
Date: Jun 3, 2020 12:23PM

By all means use a screen reader to help find bugs, but as with all tools you need to be aware that it will lie to you, so you need to protect yourself against that. As we find better testing tools and techniques (mostly single purpose tools) I find I hardly use a screen reader at all during a WCAG audit. The bugs and heuristics have caused me to lose confidence in anything they tell me - they are probably the most inaccurate tool in our toolbox.

Perhaps I am more sensitive to this than most people because I have seen so many so-called accessibility consultants do really bad WCAG audits because they used screen readers instead of all the other tools that are available to us, which give more accurate results. Worse still, they invariably report the WCAG non-conformances in terms of the screen reader behaviour instead of the coding (probably because they don't understand the code, whereas the screen reader behaviour is easy to describe).

Another heuristic is that JAWS has various ways of deciding if a <table> element is a layout table, in which case it does not announce the presence of the table, the table navigation shortcuts don't work and the contents of the <td> elements are concatenated as if they were <span> elements. One heuristic is if any cell is larger than a certain size. Another is if the table only comprises a single row of <td> elements.

Steve