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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: Benjamin.Hofer
Date: Jan 27, 2021 9:17AM

Yes, Mark, that's what I think. Technically, I'm not deep enough to know exactly how browser/screenreader interaction exactly works (an article about that would be quite interesting). But why can't modern browsers / screenreaders deal with trees, menus and other role elements like with any other, more traditional, elements? I see that it's a lot more convenient to navigate a tree by arrow keys if it's implemented in a correct way. But I can't see a technical reason why information isn't passed correctly to the screenreader when using the virtual mode(which many normal users without technical background do). And, the most important apect: It very much depends on the Javascript developer how navigating such elements actually works!!
I think that would be worth passing to accessibility API teams if anyone's here being able to do that.

Ben
-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > Im Auftrag von Mark Magennis
Gesendet: Mittwoch, 27. Januar 2021 16:25
An: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Betreff: Re: [WebAIM] [EXTERNAL] Accessibility: ARIA trees obviously not accessible with NVDa/JAWS screenreader and Firefox/Chrome on Windows

It seems a bit strange to me too Ben but it's not confined to treeviews. Take a menu for example. Jaws enters forms mode in a menu (role="menu"). I would have expected that if I exit forms mode by pressing numpad + while still in the menu Jaws, now in virtual mode, would respond to the down arrow by reading the next element instead of traversing the menu. But instead, it traverses the menu, wrapping if that's the behaviour the menu scripting implements. So it seems that while you are inside a menu, Jaws passes key presses to the browser no matter what and you can't stop that. Which makes me wonder why it needed to enter forms mode in the first place.

Mark