RE: jQuery events , ufo and screenreaders

Using .hide() would be fine if the intention was to hide the content from
all users.   If you want the information to be accessible to screen reader
users only, I always recommend considering first why something should be
seen by screen reader users and not other users before making the decision
of placing text off-screen.



If your comments regarding the .hide() method are referring to using the
animated features of this method – then yes for non-decorative animation
there must be an equivalent method of accessing the same information. If the
animation is purely decorative, it’s presence is not required to be
announced to users of screen readers and having their may actually clutter
the page.



Jonathan



*From:* w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org] *On
Behalf Of *Gavin Thomas
*Sent:* Tuesday, March 08, 2011 7:00 AM
*To:* w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
*Subject:* 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?