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