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Re: Jaws not opening links

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From: Steve Green
Date: Oct 15, 2021 11:12AM

We are now experiencing the same sort of problems that Laura reported with regard to screen reader behaviour with PDFs. However, we are seeing slightly different behaviours on two different machines. The common factor is that the problems only started happening after the most recent Windows update, which in my case happened today.

We are seeing quite a number of adverse behaviours, such as:

1. NVDA reads all the content of a multi-page PDF, but the first page is displayed the whole time, even when other pages are being read.

2. In NVDA, the browse mode cursor is displayed around the entire page all the time. It no longer highlights the content that is being read. The cursor displays as expected on web pages.

3. I have a single-page PDF that contains one link. I cannot give it focus by pressing the Tab key. Instead, I have to press Shift+Tab.

4. As in Laura's case, links cannot be operated by pressing the Enter key, but they can be operated by pressing Shift+Enter. However, unlike Laura, I cannot operate the links using Ctrl+Enter.

I am conducting the majority of these tests with PDFs that we remediated a few months ago and were thoroughly tested with both JAWS and NVDA on this machine at the time. I uninstalled and reinstalled NVDA and Adobe Reader, but this made no difference at all.

One of my colleagues has a PC that has not yet had the recent update, and it is not exhibiting any of these behaviours with the same documents - everything works as expected.

So what on earth have Microsoft done to cause this? Why do we see different bugs on different machines? And how soon will they fix it? In the meantime, I'm going to restore an old disk image and try to prevent it from doing a Windows update.

Regards,
Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd
020 3002 4176 (direct)
0800 612 2780 (switchboard)
07957 246 276 (mobile)
020 7692 5517 (fax)
Skype: testpartners
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www.testpartners.co.uk
 
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