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September 03, 2003

Components and accessibility

Over the next couple of weeks, I want to talk about the accessibility of our new components. I thought I would start this series of entries off by looking at a few release notes for these components.

These components are supported by JAWS 4.5 and Window Eyes 4.2 and more recent versions of each. They are Flash Player 7 and 6,0,r79. ComboBox and ListBox are supported by Flash Player 7 only.

The following components are accessible:

Known Issues with Component Accessibility

ComboBox:
First, the combobox uses Ctrl+Down to open the pull down menu but the screen reader will not announce this change. When the user presses Alt+Down the screen reader will announce "Open listbox" but won't open the pulldown. Also the screen reader does not announce anything while closing the ComboBox using Ctrl+Up. Second, screen readers will not announce any of the components on the flash movie of the html page which are after the very first instance of the Combobox. To navigate to the other components which are after ComboBox, the user has to enter into the Forms mode and navigate using the "Tab" key.
ListBox:
First, the ListBox shares the second issue of the ComboBox listed above. Second, on receiving focus using the tab or shift+tab keys, the screen reader does not speak the current state of the component. Third, for multiple selections (contiguous & discontinuous), on pressing the Shift/Ctrl key along with up/down Key, the screen reader does not speak the label of the selected items.
RadioButton:
Focus does not change within the radio group by pressing the arrow keys. To navigate, enter into the forms mode and tab into the radio group.
Window & Alert:
The screen reader does not recognize the Window or Alert component on popup. This is a known issue with the screen reader.

Posted by Bob Regan at September 3, 2003 09:38 AM

Comments

Bob:

Is mm planning to fix these known issues and release in another F7.rx?

I have also noticed that when entering forms mode in an input field, if there's more than one word in the field, only the last word is selected -- this poses an obvious problem for the visually impaired, One could set the selection of the entire field [Selection.setSelection(beign, end):], but that seems like a workaround. Thoughts?

Thanks,
Brian Riley

Posted by: Brian Riley at January 27, 2004 11:57 AM

Howdy,

We are constantly working to improve from release to release. I can not speak to plans for updated releases to the player. However, I can say that for each release, we include improvements in the area of accessibility.

As to the specific issue of setting the point of focus. This requires support within the screen reader as well as support in the Flash player. We are working with several vendors to look into adding this level of support into their products.

Posted by: Bob Regan at January 27, 2004 01:08 PM