role heading and attribute aria-level

Hi all,

My apologies if you get to read this twice, as I cross-posted it in another, very popular, accessibility forum.

I was looking for an alternative for a header tag, since the location I needed it to be in does now allow a header tag (I needed to mark a legend tag as a header, and you can't have <h> tags inside <legends> tags). So I did my little research and came across ARIA role="heading" and its attribute aria-level  http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/wiki/Using_role%3Dheading

In order to first test this, I used the code example from the above link

<div role="heading" aria-level="3">Jonagold</div>
<p>Jonagold is a cross between the Golden Delicious and Jonathan varieties...</p>

<div role="heading">Julius</div>
<p>Julius was a caesar, not a salad...</p>

<div role="heading" aria-level="7">Siamese</div>
<p>Siamese can be twins, or can be cats, or twin cats... Mind blowing!</p>


I tested it in: MSIE 8, FireFox 27.0, Safari 6.1.1, and the following screen readers JAWS 15.0.7023, NVDA 2013.3, VoiceOver.
Both NVDA and VoiceOver had no problems handling the role="heading" without a level, or the unusual level 7.  They both read it as "heading" or as "heading level seven", and both allowed for header navigation.  JAWS, on the other hand, recognized all the headers, but in both cases (just role="heading" and aria-level="7") it defaulted back to treat both those cases as a header level two.

Any ideas why would JAWS not play nice with ARIA?  And if this a bug in JAWS, would anyone be so kind to point me in the right direction of how to file a bug report with Freedom Scientific?

Thank you!

Geri Druckman
Web Development Specialist - Accessibility
Department of Internet Services
MD Anderson Cancer Center
T 713-792-6293 | F 713-745-8134