Re: Setting focus in a form and screenreaders

Hi Mike and all,

There are at and platform/user agent combinations which would ignore  
this.  even without the at, this will be the case.  As for those that  
play along, this happens all the time and while it can be a bit  
anoying, we just use our tools to read the page.  check out google  
for instance.
On Apr 23, 2006, at 6:04 PM, Mike Brown wrote:


I've been asked to create a form and on page load have the focus set  
to a particular field in the form. I've used some javascript to do that.

It then occurred to me that a screenreader, on loading the page,  
would be immediately at the form filed and miss all the information  
before the field.

I tested briefly in a demo copy of JAWS and found that to be the case.

It seems to me this is a major accessibility issue for the form.  
Would an experienced screenreader user has some way of overriding  
this behaviour which would mitigate the problem? Are they any  
alternative ways of accomplishing the same thing?

Thanks for any help.

Mike

Received on Sunday, 23 April 2006 23:06:43 UTC