Re: jquery, screen readers and winXP extra info

Here are accessible jquery-ui widgets developed by Hans Hillen:

http://access.aol.com/aegis<http://access.aol.com/aegis/#goto_slider>/

Jon


From: Roger Hudson <rhudson@usability.com.au<mailto:rhudson@usability.com.au>>
Date: Sat, 5 May 2012 08:37:59 +1000
To: W3C WAI-IG <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org<mailto:w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>>
Subject: jquery, screen readers and winXP extra info
Resent-From: W3C WAI-IG <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org<mailto:w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>>
Resent-Date: Fri, 4 May 2012 22:39:33 +0000

Sorry, I missed an important piece of information relating to the show and hide question. The problem described below only occurred when the page was accessed using IE8. With Firefox the show hide feature worked fine. So many variables!

From: Roger Hudson [mailto:rhudson@usability.com.au]
Sent: Saturday, 5 May 2012 8:24 AM
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org<mailto:w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Subject: jquery, screen readers and winXP

Hi
I am currently looking at the use of jquery for a number of things including modal dialogs and the show and hide effect, and how well they are supported by JAWS (12 and 13) and NVDA (2012). I should add the pages I have been testing all contain a fair amount of ARIA. I am getting some strange results and I was wondering if anyone could offer some insights or suggestions. Here are two specific questions.

First, how well is jquery (or for that matter ARIA) supported by Windows XP? I ask this, because a show and hide effect I have been working on works fine with JAWS and NVDA with Windows 7, but doesn’t appear to be recognised when the same page is accessed with same versions of the screen readers but using Windows XP. The link that contains the trigger for the show/hide is not recognised as a link at all.

Second, has anyone else had problems with dialogs disrupting the normal behaviour of screen readers? I have noticed that jquery modal dialogs can sometimes cause JAWS to switch into “application mode” unexpectedly when you are in the dialog. And this greatly restricts the ability to move around the dialog with the keyboard. Even worse, when you close the dialog and return to the normal page, JAWS remains in “application mode” until you move to another page or refresh the page (not just the virtual buffer). Something similar appears to happen with NVDA. I did a Google search on this and came across a report suggesting a problem similar to this could be something to do with aria-labelledby, but I can’t really see why.

Any help would be most appreciated.

Thanks,
Roger