WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

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

for

From: Patrick H. Lauke
Date: Jan 27, 2021 9:20AM

On 27/01/2021 16:17, <EMAIL REMOVED> wrote:
> 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.

Just picking up on the last point - making it dependent on Javascript
developers. That's pretty much inevitable, since there is no actual
native tree widget HTML element with built-in behaviour. So, to mimic
this non-standard (for the web/HTML) concept, you simply can't get
around relying on custom Javascript to handle all interactions, focus
handling, keyboard support, etc.

P
--
Patrick H. Lauke

https://www.splintered.co.uk/ | https://github.com/patrickhlauke
https://flickr.com/photos/redux/ | https://www.deviantart.com/redux
twitter: @patrick_h_lauke | skype: patrick_h_lauke