Re: Screen Reader Tests - now with Chrome and adds PDF Sufficient Techniques

Hi Mark,

It seems to me, that you're the right person to ask about  a quite specific problem, I'm thinking about for quite a while - answers from all members of this lists are welcome, of course.

If a table can be sorted (for example personal data, that can be sorted by last name or city), there is a button in the th.

Is the value of the button announced in every cell of the column?

The problem is: it’s actual similar to a toggle button, you can change the sorting from ascending to descending after clicking it again (but you can never reset it to the initial value). So I think the information to give ist something like this: “The whole table is ordered by this column and the sorting is ascending - clicking the button will change the sorting to ascending”.

It's already a challenge for people that do see - normally it's done with icons (arrow up/down) which are nearly meaningless (does the arrow up indicate the current state or what will happen, if I press the button. And if it shows the current state, does it the arrow up mean, that the highest value is at the top (descending) what seems to be logical, as it shows from bottom (low) to up (high)? Or does it mean, the sorting is ascending, because an arrow up implicitly tells me that (what means, the highest value is at the bottom of the column). But leaving this problem aside and also, that I cannot get back to the initial state and nothing represents this information: how do I support screen reader users?

It seems to be much simpler, because I can give a much more explicit information by simply writing what is the current state and what will happen if the user interacts with the button.I’d suggest something like this:

<th>
  <span class=“visuallyhidden”>Ordered by </span>Name <span class=“visuallyhidden”>sorting is ascending</span> <button>change to descending sorting ordered by name</button>
</th>

The problem here is: I don’t want the whole information to be announced in every cell of this column.

So I think aria-labelledby could be a solution, but I have two more questions:

1. If I write some information somewhere on the page and refer to it with aria-labelledby, does screenreader not read it at every cell?
2. Where do I “store” this information? I don't want it to be read outside of the th? - But in the th I can’t keep it, because it would be announced in every cell…

Is there any best practice for this case?

By the way: great site!

Marc








On 13. Jan 2020, at 15:59, Mark Rogers <mark.rogers@powermapper.com<mailto:mark.rogers@powermapper.com>> wrote:

Hi

We’ve just done a refresh of the Screen Reader Tests at:
https://www.powermapper.com/tests/


This release has just over 10,000 test results and adds Chrome to the browsers tested:

• NVDA 2019 with Chrome, Firefox and IE11
* JAWS 2019 with Chrome, Firefox and IE11

We've also added some new test cases for PDF including most PDF Sufficient Techniques. Unfortunately, AT/browser support for these is still quite patchy:
https://www.powermapper.com/tests/screen-readers/pdf/


Comparison of different AT/browser combinations here. Chrome would have been the outright winner in both JAWS and NVDA if we'd only tested HTML, but poor accessibility support in Chrome's PDF viewer lowered its score:
https://www.powermapper.com/tests/screen-readers/


Best Regards
Mark

--
Mark Rogers - mark.rogers@powermapper.com
PowerMapper Software Ltd - www.powermapper.com
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