Question about Braille Best Practices

I sent the below email last month through Tutorial Feedback. I'm still hoping someone can answer or direct me to another group or individual who has more braille experience or knowledge. I am trying to find out if there is some group in W3C that is looking further into accessibility issues for braille users. While this may be an area that we can't currently improve with coding fixes on our websites, due to current technology issues with refreshable braille displays, I feel that there is an opportunity to inform the public about the additional issues that braille users face. Most people don't understand that what is accessible for JAWS doesn't make it accessible to a person using JAWS with a refreshable braille display.

I currently work with a site tester that uses JAWS and a refreshable braille display and was surprised to learn an accessible PDF is not accessible for a braille user. From what she has told me, currently word documents are not accessible, and even TXT files cause problems with the refreshable braille display. I was also surprised when she told me that the last update to Microsoft Word has made Word go from accessible to inaccessible for braille users. I am hoping to find/support/advocate for any efforts being made in the area of increasing public knowledge of what is and is not helpful to best support accessibility for users of refreshable braille displays.

I look forward to your response.
Best Regards,

Elizabeth A. Dunn
Audit/Training Manager

Office of Information Technology Services
50 Wolf Road, Albany, NY 12232
518/935-3383 (cell) | elizabeth.dunn@its.ny.gov<mailto:elizabeth.dunn@its.ny.gov>
webnysupport@its.ny.gov<mailto:webnysupport@its.ny.gov>

From: Dunn, Elizabeth (ITS)
Sent: Friday, September 18, 2020 5:37 PM
To: wai-eo-editors@w3.org
Cc: shadi@w3.org; eric@w3.org
Subject: [Tutorial Feedback]

In  https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/forms/instructions/  is the statement,

"One approach is to use the WAI-ARIA aria-labelledby attribute to associate instructions with form controls. At the time of writing this tutorial, this approach is not fully supported by all web browsers and assistive technologies, for example, Braille displays. To ensure backward compatibility, the for and id attributes are also used in this example."

correct as of the updated date of July 27, 2019 or the first published year of 2014. We want to be sure to implement the best way to ensure our errors are as accessible as possible for refreshable Braille displays.

Also is the above statement true for the "WAI-ARIA aria-describedby attribute"?

Is there a best practices resource for refreshable Braille displays. On of our employees uses one and I am disappointed to see how much is not accessible to her when using this AT in conjunction with JAWS. Much of what we struggle with is the conversion of document text into a readable braille format, but if some ARIA labels on webpages don't work with braille displays, how do we address accessibility needs of braille users. These issues are not really obvious in the WCAGs. I recently saw a W3C Working Draft dated 17 July 2020, titled Making Content Usable for People with Cognitive and Learning Disabilities. Is there something like this in the works for braille users?

Thank you so much for your time and input.

Elizabeth A. Dunn
Audit/Training Manager

Office of Information Technology Services
50 Wolf Road, Albany, NY 12232
518/935-3383 (cell) | elizabeth.dunn@its.ny.gov<mailto:elizabeth.dunn@its.ny.gov>
webnysupport@its.ny.gov<mailto:webnysupport@its.ny.gov>