RE: Using ARIA to control screen readers

Benjamin, I think you may have missed part of the conversation.  The point
was is that in the example you give which I am very familiar with you can
NOT know where the screen reader virtual cursor is current at.  With a
solution that provides a hotkey for reading items as well as description you
WILL know what the screen reader is reading because you will be directing it
to be announced via ARIA.

Jonathan

-----Original Message-----
From: Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis [mailto:bhawkeslewis@googlemail.com]
Sent: Friday, November 12, 2010 2:10 AM
To: Jonathan Avila
Cc: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: Re: Using ARIA to control screen readers

On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 1:51 AM, Jonathan Avila
<jon.avila@ssbbartgroup.com> wrote:
> This would however require
> the user to learn some keystrokes for this site.  In addition, some screen
> reader like JAWS would not pass the single letter keystrokes through to
> the
> web application.

I think these are strong arguments against trying to attach this
functionality to the "D" key.

Typical screen readers provide a universal interface by which users
can jump from list item to list item and from heading to heading,
skipping intermediate content.

So in this case what's wrong with markup like:

<h1>Cars</h1>
<ul>
  <li>
     <h2>Ford Focus</h2>
     <p>description goes here</p>
  </li>
  <li>
    <h2>Ferrari</h2>
    <p>description goes here</p>
  </li>
... and so on ...
</ul>

which would allow users to use the interface they already know?

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis

Received on Friday, 12 November 2010 13:26:43 UTC