With the rapid development in certain user agents (take that, Firefox!), I’m a little late in getting these up, but I figure some of them are still useful to share. In any case, I posted to YouTube five videos of various screen readers interacting with basic HTML5 section elements and ARIA landmarks. These are videos I presented at the 2011… Continue reading Videos of Screen Readers with Basic HTML5 and ARIA Landmarks
My slides from the OZeWAI 2011 conference:
If you use explicitly ranked h1 to h6 headings nested in HTML5 sectioning elements, as opposed to using exclusively h1 elements, JAWS 12.0.1170, as well as the JAWS 13.0.171 beta, will misrepresent the heading hierarchy. Headings in HTML5 The HTML5 outline algorithm allows us to use the h1 element for every heading on a page, and depending on the nesting… Continue reading JAWS, IE and Headings in HTML5
When I first rolled out this site, I figured I would write protracted research articles on accessibility, as well as shorter blog posts of an ad hoc nature, hence the previous and separate “Research” and “Blog” sections of the site. Turns out I’m hardly that prolific, and the distinction between research articles and blog posts soon became rather arbitrary. So… Continue reading Small Change to Site Architecture
When Chris Coyier presented his approach to responsive data tables, I wondered about the implications for accessibility, particularly for screen readers. This was especially so since the approach involves replicating each of the table’s column headers as CSS-generated content for the relevant table cell, and presenting each data cell, together with this generated header text, as a block-level element. In… Continue reading Responsive Data Tables and Screen Reader Accessibility
display:none: Return to 2007I was recently asked if JAWS and Window-Eyes still displayed the bugs described by Gez Lemon in 2007 whereby content hidden using display:none was read by the screen readers under certain conditions. The JAWS Bug Back then, the situation with JAWS 7.1 was that it announces content in a span element hidden with display: none if it is in an… Continue reading JAWS, Window-Eyes and display:none: Return to 2007
Are you, at least in a professional capacity, occasionally asked to provide rather ad hoc comments on this or that web page markup? I am. Regularly, though, I make the mistake of assuming that the developers who will be receiving my comments are aware of web standards and accessibility concerns that I typically consider part of good development. This is… Continue reading Take the Time with Quick Reviews to Go Into Detail
Last year, in HTML5, ARIA Roles, and Screen Readers in March 2010, I took a look at how then current screen readers behaved with some of the HTML5 section elements and related WAI-ARIA document and landmark roles. Now that the major screen readers have all seen some significant updates, and both Firefox 4 and Internet Explorer 9 have officially been… Continue reading HTML5, ARIA Roles, and Screen Readers in March 2011
aria-labelledbyThis is just a quick note on spelling. The specification for aria-labelledby identifies the attribute’s correct spelling as “aria-labelledby”, as opposed to what might be its expected U.S. English spelling, “aria-labeledby”. Apparently, the approved spelling was selected to minimize the difficulty for developers. However, seeing as how easy it is to find examples in the wild where the attribute is… Continue reading It’s Spelled aria-labelledby
alert Test CaseI put together a few examples of ARIA alerts and tested them with JAWS and NVDA in Firefox 3.6, Internet Explorer 7 and 8. The interesting bit is how alerts can be improved for JAWS 10 in Internet Explorer by adding an aria-live attribute value of “assertive”. Continue reading An ARIA alert Test Case