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Re: [EXTERNAL] Accessibility: ARIA trees obviously not accessible with NVDa/JAWS screenreader and Firefox/Chrome on Windows

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From: Mark Magennis
Date: Jan 27, 2021 4:05AM

Hi Benjamin,

I have an idea that this may be to do with the screen reader expecting you to be in forms/focus mode in order to access the tree content. As you know, Aria treeviews are intended to implement a keyboard interaction pattern which is coded using Javascript. Screen readers Jaws and NVDA know this. So when you tab into the treeview (assuming the first element is focusable the screen reader automatically switches into forms mode (Jaws) or focus mode (NVDA term for the same thing).

My conjecture: When you arrow into the treeview the screen reader doesn't enter forms/ focus mode, but I'm guessing that it expects you to manually enter forms/focus mode if you want to interact with it and doesn't support interacting with it 'correctly' in browse mode.

So the screen reader is making a decision not to allow access to the tree content in browse mode.

Anyone think this is correct/wildly wrong?