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

for

From: Peter Krautzberger
Date: Jan 27, 2021 9:24AM

Hi Benjamin

> 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.

One reason I can think of is that trees might not have all their children
present in the DOM - e.g., in a cloud storage system, a folder view tree
might fetch the subdirectory structure asynchronously.

Slightly related: the ARIA Working Group has had a couple of deep-dive
meetings in recent months about trees, cf.
https://github.com/w3c/aria/issues/1311

Best regards,
Peter Krautzberger.

Am Mi., 27. Jan. 2021 um 17:17 Uhr schrieb < <EMAIL REMOVED> >:

> 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
>
>