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

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From: Steve Green
Date: Jun 4, 2020 3:31AM

Pretty much every week I find ways in which all sorts of tools provide incorrect or misleading results. I disseminate this knowledge among our team and I will soon turn these emails into blogs on our website.

One example is that the search feature in browser developer tools sometimes reports no matches for a search string even though there are matches. We use lots of bookmarklets that help to test a single WCAG success criterion, but sometimes they give the wrong result. We are increasingly using SortSite to do automated testing after a manual WCAG audit, and I find bugs in SortSite every time I use it. To their credit, SortSite acknowledge and fix the bugs, but there always seem to be more.

I can't really comment on whether JAWS' heuristics are improving because our test process is designed such that we avoid them. The typical sequence of events is that we do the WCAG audit by code inspection, then the client fixes all the issues, then we do a screen reader review. At that point the screen reader does not need to rely on any heuristics because everything has been fixed. The issues identified in the screen reader review are therefore mostly screen reader bugs, cognitive issues and intentional behaviours that are a poor user experience. The latter typically includes any feature that uses application mode.

Steve