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Re: Jaws not opening links

for

From: Steve Green
Date: Oct 17, 2021 6:31AM


Thanks David, however the <EMAIL REMOVED> email address does not work anymore. The person I spoke to on the Microsoft Disability Answer Desk was not even aware that they had ever had an email address.

Having spent 2 hours on the phone with them and having done many hours more testing, all the evidence shows that the problem is with Adobe Reader, not Windows. I suspect that we were misled by Adobe Reader silently updating at around the same time as the recent Windows update.

On the machines I have access to, the issues occur with the latest version of Adobe Reader (2021.007.20099) regardless of the Windows version.

The issues do not occur on a machine with Adobe Reader 2021.007.20091 and Adobe Acrobat 2021.007.20095 with the latest version of Windows (21H1 OS Build 19043. 1288) and an earlier build (21H1 OS Build 19043. 1201).

Unfortunately, there does not appear to be any way to obtain recent versions of Adobe Reader. They do have an FTP site at ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/win/AcrobatDC/, but there are a couple of gotchas:

1. Chrome and Firefox no longer support FTP, so I had to use Internet Explorer! You might be able to use an FTP client, but WS_FTP 12 wouldn't connect because it insisted I enter a username and password, even though neither is required.

2. The most recent version of Adobe Reader I could find was dated 28 October 2020. I uninstalled the latest version and installed this one, and JAWS now works properly with PDFs again. It's not ideal to be using such an old version, but it's good enough to allow us to continue testing PDFs until Adobe release a fix.

If anyone knows how to obtain a more recent version of Adobe reader, please let me know.

Steve


-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of David Engebretson Jr.
Sent: 15 October 2021 20:24
To: 'WebAIM Discussion List' < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Jaws not opening links

You can send concerns to the Microsoft Disability Answer Desk:
<EMAIL REMOVED>

Or, if you are in an enterprise situation, the Enterprise Disability Desk can be summoned at:
<EMAIL REMOVED>

Thanks!
David


-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of <EMAIL REMOVED>
Sent: Friday, October 15, 2021 10:39 AM
To: 'WebAIM Discussion List' < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Jaws not opening links

Thanks for confirming that, Steve.
When combined with Adobe's PDF updates over the past couple of weeks, services to those with disabilities has now become nearly non-existent.

Does anyone here have direct access to Microsoft's interior development teams and can pass these bug descriptions up to the powers that be?

—Bevi Chagnon
— — —
Bevi Chagnon | Designer, Accessibility Technician | <EMAIL REMOVED> — — —
PubCom: Technologists for Accessible Design + Publishing consulting ' training ' development ' design ' sec. 508 services Upcoming classes at www.PubCom.com/classes — — — Latest blog-newsletter – Simple Guide to Writing Alt-Text

-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of Steve Green
Sent: Friday, October 15, 2021 1:13 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: [WebAIM] Jaws not opening links

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
<EMAIL REMOVED>
www.testpartners.co.uk

Connect to me on LinkedIn - http://uk.linkedin.com/in/stevegreen2