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Re: Differences Between Testing With JAWS And NVDA

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From: Patrick H. Lauke
Date: Mar 18, 2022 8:44AM

On 18/03/2022 14:00, Jim Homme wrote:
> Hi,
> I usually do accessibility testing with NVDA. For those of you who test with JAWS, what differences do you notice when comparing the results between the two screen readers and what JAWS settings do you change from the defaults?

Two aspects where I find the most differences:

* if focus is lost (e.g. you activate a button, and the button is
dynamically changed to be "disabled", or is set to display:none, or
something similar where whatever element you had focus on is yanked from
the page/focus cycle), most modern browsers silently error-correct for
this next time you TAB/SHIFT+TAB, trying to find the closest next
focusable element to whatever used to have the focus before and now
isn't there anymore. with NVDA, this seems to also apply to using
reading keys. As the browser heuristics/error correction fallback isn't
really reliable, this can give a false sense that the author has
correctly handled focus. Testing with JAWS however, as soon as the
currently focused element disappears, JAWS resets to the start of the
document unless focus has been explicitly handled via JS to go somewhere
else. I prefer the latter for testing.

* NVDA seems be be a lot more lenient (at least when testing with
Chrome) to things like CSS-based images where the container has been
given an aria-label, e.g. <span class="icon" aria-label="Delete"></span>
- it announces the aria-label most of the times. With JAWS, it only
works reliably if the author also gave the container an actual proper
role, like role="img" or similar. Again, better to test in JAWS in these
cases to spot this.

P
--
Patrick H. Lauke

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