Hi all, Apologies to those who have seen this already. However, if you are a JAWS 7.1 user, having problems with certain web pages, the following may help you to resolve them. It's a very long posting, but informative. George Bell. -----Original Message----- From: jaws-uk-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:jaws-uk-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Tristram Llewellyn Sent: 14 July 2006 14:58 To: jaws-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [jaws-uk] Jaws 7.10 and BBC News Page This post is about Jaws 7.10 and the BBC News website www.bbc.co.uk/news and what may appear to users as a Jaws bug when visiting this page. Users of this page have been experiencing problems with links appearing to either change or repeat themselves when working their way down the page. This is a longish post but I beg list members indulgence here because it will take quite a few words to describe what and why some of these issues are arising. I have tried to move the solution as close to the top of this post as I can, if you can stay the course, there are goodies of a sort at the end of it. Those users who have downloaded Jaws 7.10 have certainly noticed a change in the way Jaws handles the Internet. What I hope to do is explain why and offer a solution to the specific issue mentioned above on the BBC News website. Jaws 7.10 may appear by indication of version number only to be a maintenance release consisting of bug fixes and odd little feature. There is in rather more going on beneath the bonnet. To employ a slightly more helpful metaphor there has been some re-plumbing going on. The result of such developments however can result in some new puzzle that takes a bit of solving. Jaws 7.10 and the BBC News website is such a beast. Before going directly to the solution I beg the reader's indulgence here to pad out an explanation in order to give a wider picture. So, what is the big deal with Jaws 7.10 and why doesn't it do what Jaws 7.0 did on the web? Users experiencing problems with the Internet with Jaws 7.10 may ask why change it if it was working so well. Well, the thing is that it was not. Furthermore, as the web changes users will begin to see more and more bits missing assuming Jaws support for the web remains static. Some list members will possibly know already that there are things on the web that Jaws has not been able to access. For a wider but also somewhat deeper understanding of this issue please see the "Some Background" section a bit later on in this message, which probably ensures it has an audience of about one or less. However, I urge the reader to look in on it as it will round out the detail that pertains to the more specific problems experienced on the BBC News site which I will deal with now. The BBC News website like many others makes use of Flash in places. Users of Jaws 7.0 are probably not aware of it simply because Jaws simply does not see it. On the other hand, Jaws 7.10 can see this happening perfectly well and therein lies our little puzzle. If you have not done so but would like to reproduce the problem for yourself here are the steps: Steps: 1. Go to www.bbc.co.uk 2. Down Arrow to the radio button that says UK version and select it, then refresh the page. 3. On this page, select the "News" Link. 4. On the news page, go down past the two lists (The first list has sports, weather, editor's blog, etc and the second is languages). 5. Further down you now enter the news stories and links. As you arrow through this with 7.1, you will find it reads some items twice and sometimes it skips items. 6. If you down arrow over a few links and then up arrow over them you are getting different order of reading. If you load up 7.0 JAWS and try the same thing, it is flawless. The BBC News website is constructed in such a way that there is something called a "news ticker" frame. Inside this area is a link to various stories that constantly updates approximately every four seconds in a longish loop. The rest of the website is static conventional web page. When you use Jaws 7.0 on the site it strolls straight past this news ticker, but Jaws 7.10 can see this. Likewise, if you have set your Jaws 7.10 back to legacy support you will get the same effect as with Jaws 7.0. If you have Jaws 7.10 running in "non legacy" mode then you may be able to sit on the ticker line and at intervals press insert+up arrow to read the line and you will hear that at intervals it actually changes. However the problems start further down when you cursor through the stories as sometimes Jaws will seem to repeat things. You may now begin to see where things are going wrong, because every time the ticker changes it distorts the model of the page that you are reading by updating it, parts of the site that previously did not move with Jaws 7.10 move every time the ticker updates. Knowledge of this fact now helps us to arrive at some kind of solution that is applicable to this site and potentially find wider application to other sites where you experience a similar problem. The solution would be to stop the page from refreshing with Jaws. There is a feature in the Jaws verbosity menu (insert+V) to do this under the letter R for "Refresh page" which you can toggle with the spacebar to "Refresh page off". This is only a temporary adjustment, but it will resolve the problem If you use this website a lot then it may be best to make this setting permanent for this website domain. That way when you go it you will not have this problem whilst still having the ability on other websites to leave the pages to update themselves where this does not cause problems. Pressing shift+insert+V will give you a dialogue set of options similar to the verbosity menu you can customize any option here the way you want it for this domain. In this case, you want to press letter R for "refresh page" and toggle it off. When you are done, tab to the "execute" button and press spacebar on it. Now every time you go to the BBC your page refreshes will be stopped and you will regain stable access to the BBC. In brief conclusion, the behaviour of Jaws 7.10 on the BBC News page is not really a bug but a feature of the new way Jaws accesses the Internet. At times this will impact upon how Jaws performs but this new form of access can be tamed by use of the "refresh page" feature in the verbosity menu, and it also provide potential for improved access as well. Some Background The purpose of this bit is to give an insight into how screen readers and most particularly Jaws is working. Whilst realising that this sort of thing is not for everyone I think it would be worth a mention. I hope by construction of this text that I satisfy the need for immediacy without sacrificing a deeper understanding. I intend not to baffle but provide an insight into the universe that the screen reader user inhabits and in that way to render that world more sensible and less arbitrary. You may have heard it said that screen readers intercept information; you may have even heard the term video interceptor before or even on this list. The point about this is that screen readers are about information, where you get it from and how you format and convey it to the user. In the beginning in a far distant past of MS-DOS life was relatively simple for a screen reader develop, catch messages sent to screen via BIOS, monitor the keyboard, stay within the rather tight limits of memory you were afforded. OK, that is a rather simplistic description that belies the tremendous early efforts of companies like Henter-Joyce but also not forgetting Dolphin Systems in the UK. Even getting live screen reading or key echo as we would expect it to be was a real task. The concept I want to get over is that even from the beginning a key part of screen reading was obtaining information, often surreptitiously from the computer for the purposes of screen reading. Likewise Jaws et al today are intercepting all sorts of messages that the operating system generates to allow things to work. These messages are by-and-large not intended for Jaws or any other screen reader. With the notable exception of MSAA they are all more or less a by-product of the system doing its job. However, it is also convenient and helpful in some cases for Jaws to intercept these and attempt to decode those messages because they are relevant to the events on screen that Jaws needs to relay to the user. Therefore, we have not just one but a number of different sources of information Jaws plugs into, from the video interceptor and GDI interface through to MSAA. Because none of these sources yields perfect or complete information Jaws sometimes tries to stitch together these difference sources of info in order to create a full and accurate picture. However, there are still situations where Jaws misses out altogether and there is no information at all. A while back developers at FS were aware of these things, and dealing also with the problem of how to provide consistent support for Internet Explorer 6.0, Firefox and Acrobat Reader without having to re-write support from scratch for each of these applications. Equally, technologies like JavaScript, XML and applications used over the web known as AJAX threaten to snatch access to web from screen reader users. Therefore, support would have to be substantially re-written in order not loose the plot. Rather than create an entirely new technology the developers at FS have exploited a relatively recent development known as Document Object Modelling. Previously software could be written to expose certain parts of their inner workings to the operating system for direct enquiry, this is chiefly responsible for the sophisticated support for Microsoft Office Jaws has about it. The newer Document Object Model (or DOM for short) goes somewhat further. This is in essence a way to allow applications to work with documents down to a very detailed level representing them as objects within the operating to be queried and manipulated. This is not limited by any means to Jaws in fact it is more that Jaws has only recently moved into this area of document management. What FS had to do is to create a way of extracting this information from the Document Object Model so that it is compatible with Jaws and eventually rendered to the user in a form they can understand. A side effect of this process is that more things become available to view by this process. In theory, anything that writes into the Document Object Model may be available for Jaws too. This means that there are likely to be quirks like the example of BBC News website, but it also means there is real potential to get hold of other information that previously was beyond reach. A noticeable but perhaps not very useful side effect of this support is accuracy, Jaws cursor routing will now far more accurately locate on screen the position of the virtual PC cursor. Regards. Tristram Llewellyn Sight and Sound Technology Technical Support www.sightandsound.co.uk ** To leave the list, click on the immediately-following link:- ** [mailto:jaws-uk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx?subject=unsubscribe] ** If this link doesn't work then send a message to: ** jaws-uk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx ** and in the Subject line type ** unsubscribe ** For other list commands such as vacation mode, click on the ** immediately-following link:- ** [mailto:jaws-uk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx?subject=faq] ** or send a message, to ** jaws-uk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the Subject:- faq ** To leave the list, click on the immediately-following link:- ** [mailto:access-uk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx?subject=unsubscribe] ** If this link doesn't work then send a message to: ** access-uk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx ** and in the Subject line type ** unsubscribe ** For other list commands such as vacation mode, click on the ** immediately-following link:- ** [mailto:access-uk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx?subject=faq] ** or send a message, to ** access-uk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the Subject:- faq