jquery events , ufo and screenreaders

I recently did some recent testing with a blind student using JAWS on some new pages that use some jquery events and the 'accessible' SWF object (to insert flash)

Something I noticed is, any pages that use the .hide() functionality : http://api.jquery.com/hide/  are also hidden to JAWS.
Keyboard/mouse can trigger the show() event on a link but of course this won't always occur with a screenreader as they are reading the markup

I'm now asking developers to avoid using this and implement a class which hides the content off screen.

http://webaim.org/blog/hiding-content-for-screen-readers/


The other thing I came across is the SWFobject script to embed flash: http://code.google.com/p/swfobject/

I always thought that JAWS would read the alternative content. But in my testing the flash object didn't appear to gain focus and it wasn't possible to get access to the alternative (html) content.

Anyone else come across this?


On the plus side I showed her the accessible youtube player : http://www.visionaustralia.org.au/info.aspx?page=2260

And she was amazed it was announcing all the controls and she was able to play the video (rather than the current youtube implementation). We will be releasing this new player on our site soon. Does beg the question why youtube can't implement this on their site to make youtube videos available to screenreader users?