Re: jquery, screen readers and winXP

Hi,
Yes, depending on the elements used and the ARIA tags combined with them, there can be unpredictable behaviors at times. I saw a similar case yesterday where a client's A tag had the ARIA attributes aria-label, role=button, aria-haspopup=true, aria-expanded=false, and aria-controls. Due to the DOM structure of the A tag, the addition of any one of these attributes caused the entire content of a visually hidden element to be announced every time the A tag received focus. This too occurred in XP, but not in Win7, so there are differences at times. The solution in this case was to remove the ARIA attributes and use a standard link.

When role=dialog or role=application is used, it can make life difficult sometimes if it's not implemented properly. If you check out the accessible lightbox/banner/tooltip/popup demos at
http://whatsock.com/modules/standard_dynamic_control_templates/demo.htm
you'll see a dialog example that, though it uses automated ARIA attributes for screen reader users, does not make use of role=dialog or role=application for proper functionality.

I've found that role=dialog is very useful when needing to force keyboard interaction within a particular control, such as a listbox however, so it's good to have when you need it. The accessible listbox demo at
http://whatsock.com/modules/aria_sortable_listbox_module/demo.htm
makes use of this technique when the Sort button is activated, so that the ARIA listbox will properly capture the Enter and Space keys without breaking back into Virtual Cursor mode.

 Hopefully this helps a bit.

Sincerely,
Bryan Garaventa

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Roger Hudson 
  To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org 
  Sent: Friday, May 04, 2012 3:24 PM
  Subject: 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