[access-uk] Re: Questions about ARIA active elements and progress bars and general screen reader usage in the UK.
- From: "David W Wood" <david.g3yxx@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 15:46:15 -0000
Hi Jonathan
Having used JAWS for many years owing to it being sponsored by ATW, more
recently I have been exploring other options.
Window Eyes seems to be less intuitive, and when used with non-mainstream
programs seems to focus on rather random entry fields, whereas JAWS and NVDA
seem to look at the entry fields.
I also find WE less intuitive than JAWS, probably because of familiarity
with the latter, but NVDA is more intuitive to me.
Having said that, WE does have a JAWS emulation setting, but I haven't tried
this as yet.
ATB
David W Wood
-----Original Message-----
From: access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
Jonathan H
Sent: Tuesday, March 25, 2014 9:27 AM
To: access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [access-uk] Questions about ARIA active elements and progress bars
and general screen reader usage in the UK.
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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