Re: JAWS discards SPAN content?

indeed, jaws 3.7 with ie5.5 with forms mode turned on as you tab from
field to field does not announce the field labels.  however, this is
common on many pages and our work around when we use jfw as
extensively as we do in filling forms is to use the vertical arrow
keys to traverse the page till we come to a controll or field we wish
to act on and turn on forms mode, act on the controll/field and then
turn off forms mode to get to the next desired controll or field.
the work around that you were given is good if you want to mark up the
form so that jfw tracks the labels while in forms mode.  even with
forms mode turned off, tabbing yeilds only the word edit as you tab
through the boxes.  This is why I caution against coding for a
particular screen reader and why I also caution those who wish to
target screen readers to make sure that there is a well grounded user
available or that they are a well grounded user.  see the rendering
below for the effect of my description.
Thanks!
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----- Original Message -----
From: "David Holstius" <holstius@pilot.msu.edu>
To: "'W3c-Wai-Ig@W3.Org'" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Cc: "Michael Hudson" <mjh@msu.edu>
Sent: December 01, 2000 6:52 PM
Subject: JAWS discards SPAN content?


I've been messaging the kind folks over at Henter-Joyce since a
problem with
"missing content" on a web page appeared a week ago. Appearently, JAWS
VPC
discards content between SPAN tags; the problem's been reported with
IE 5.5
plus Jaws 3.7, if I recall correctly, but not with IE 5.0. An example
is
available at <http://holstius.com/span_tags.html>. Code in question
looks
something like:

  <span class="X"><label for="MyField">Some text:</label></span><input
name="Myfield" ...

where I was using a rule:

  .X { width: 12em; text-align: right; }

to make the form's input fields align nicely with their labels without
resorting to a TABLE. (Just wanted to see if it worked.) Could have
just set
the class on the LABEL tag, yes, but still this is syntactically
valid. I
got a reply from an HJ representative:

> Currently Jaws VPC does not support these tags and therefore
> Jaws is prevented from seeing the associated web form field
> labels.  The temporary solution is to remove the surrounding
> span tags from the field labels. So this web page is using a
> web tag in which Jaws did not anticipate when attempting to
> grab the label for the fields.  You are correct in that the
> web page adheres to W3 standards but Jaws simply never has
> known about this tag.  I have put this into the database as
> record 5642 as a suggestion for support.

Workable, yes, but does anyone want to see content they've put between
SPANs
(in many cases, put there to avoid deprecated or improper markup)
rendered
inaudible for users of JAWS and IE 5.5??? I urged this representative
to put
this high on his priority list of fixable bugs. If you visit the above
page
(<http://holstius.com/span_tags.html>) and don't hear anything like
"Author", "Title", "Publisher", etc. before the form fields, there's a
problem. Thanks to anyone who takes the time to check this out.

JAWS users, you may especially wish to ask HJ about this.

David Holstius
Webmaster, RCPD @ MSU
<http://www.msu.edu/~rcpd>

Received on Friday, 1 December 2000 19:28:42 UTC