[access-uk] Re: Questions about ARIA active elements and progress bars and general screen reader usage in the UK.
- From: Michael A Ray <mike.ray@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 12:29:09 +0000
I use NVDA exclusively.
I have never used Jaws and would never pay the price tag associated with
it even if I could afford it.
NVDA has advanced in recent years and I don't understand why some people
insist they simply could not do their job without Jaws. Computing is one
area where "there's more than one way to skin a cat" is certainly very
true and if one way involves paying a thousand pounds just to do what
sighted people take for granted, but skinning it another way means using
a free Open Source screen-reader, then I'll do that.
Yesterday I installed the latest beta of Apache OpenOffice and there's
now no reason to carry on using MS Office. Although NVDA works well
with MS Office the OpenOffice suite now means there's no need to use
commercial software at all apart from Windows itself.
NVDA has the major functions covered:
1. Firefox for web browsing.
2. Thunderbird for email.
3. OpenOffice for office functions.
IMHO Freedom Scientific only survive by almost giving their over-priced
product to schools and colleges knowing that as students grow up they
will want to stick with a familiar product and will then have to pay the
price tag.
I don't need to remind the list which other type of vendor is in the
habit of giving new customers their first few samples free in the
knowledge this will soon have them scurrying back, pound notes in hand.
And computer users who insist in trolling out the maxim "you get what
you pay for" have not ever had to ring a certain Worcester-based access
technology vendor only to be told by the help-desk that they don't know
the answer to the question and anyway, give us more money.
Mike
On 25/03/2014 09:27, Jonathan H wrote:
This is two questions in one. If you reply and you are in the UK, I'd
be interested to know what screen reader you use, and also what you
think most other people in the UK might use.
I'm sighted but occasionally fire up a reader to test accessibility
changes to web pages but I am struggling to make ARIA live regions and
progress bar elements work satisfactorily in multiple browsers and
readers.
I am running a reasonable specification Windows 8.1 desktop with
plenty of RAM and I installed/updated the current versions of what I
think would be the 4 major readers. Here is what I found:
JAWS 15 was the worst for almost everything - it slowed down my PC,
the default voice was the worst of the bunch, and it wouldn't work
with Google Chrome at all. In fact, starting Chrome and JAWS together
almost brought my PC to a halt. In its favour, it seemed to handle
ARIA live regions and progress bars OK when used in conjunction with
Internet Explorer 11 or the current Firefox.
NVDA 2014.1 was next and immediately became my favourite - it's come
on so far since I last tried it a year ago. Incredibly intuitive, just
works right out of the box and read the live regions perfectly. Not
only that, but the audio cue for any progress bar on the page with an
active ARIA progress cue is to play bleeps over what seems to be about
2 octaves, without interrupting the reader itself. So a thoughtful
designer could set the bar to update every 10 seconds, meaning the
user could carry on reading without interruption, but also get a cue
as to progress.
Google Chromevox was also intuitive extremely fast, and came with a
good selection of high quality voices. It handles live regions well
but annoyingly it doesn't seem to give the audio cues of the progress
element, even with ARIA cues enabled, unless you have the focus on the
progress element and keep tapping the CTRL key each time you want an
update, at which point it reads the percentage.
Windows Eyes was slow and I cannot make head or tail of it! Everything
I do just say "left" or "right" or reads the characters.. Will have to
work on this one a bit!
To summarise, I absolutely love the new version of NVDA, but of that
is the opinion of a sighted user interested only in testing web pages
within a browser. And I know not everyone uses it.
So my question is firstly, are there UP TO DATE comparison tables of
major screen reader WAI browser accessibility implementations. Also,
is there a sort of all-in-one super cheat sheet of major screen reader
hotkeys for use in browsers? I've Googled around but can only find
quite old versions of the feature comparison tables.
Finally, I know there are more specific screen reader groups, but I'm
interested to know what screen readers people use and prefer in the UK
and this is a UK-centric accessibility group, so I hope it's close
enough!
More info on ARIA live regions if you are interested:
http://www.freedomscientific.com/Training/Surfs-Up/AriaLiveRegions.htm.
Thanks.
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--
Michael A. Ray
Analyst/Programmer
Witley, Surrey, South-east UK
Ham Radio Call-sign: G4XBF, licensed since 1982
The box said: 'install Windows XP, 7 or better'. So I installed Linux
Raspberry VI:
http://www.raspberryvi.org/
NVDA, the best free screen-reader in the world:
http://www.nvda-project.org/
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