» Forums
» DynarchMenu forum
» Bug reports
» JAWS screen reader issue
JAWS screen reader issue
2005/06/20 21:47
Viewed 12005 times
Replies: 1/2
by allenajs

Had a user call just now. He is blind and works for the US Dept of Homeland Security. He does Section 508 usability testing on web sites. He uses a tool called JAWS from www.FreedomScientific.com that reads the DOM from IE to the user. The page he is having problems with was working fine for him until I added a new DynarchMenu that is dynamically built from a database. When he views the page, it dumps out and crashes the browser. He verified by having his wife view the page with the reader turned off and the page came up fine. So there is some issue with the DynarchMenu and his JAWS software...whether in the DOM or the Javascript or some combination.
Just wanted to mention this. Not sure what to do or even how to test it.
Allen
Re: JAWS screen reader issue
2005/06/21 15:55
Viewed 15121 times
Replies: 1/1
by Mihai Bazon

I'm sorry, I don't know anything about JAWS...  Theoretically, if it would ignore JavaScript then pages should be OK, given the fact that the menu is defined by plain HTML lists.  If it crashes though, it means that it either tries to execute JavaScript code or tries to use the full existing DOM (after having been modified by DynarchMenu), both of which can be bad.

An easy workaround would be to identify a JAWS browser in your server-side scripts and if that's the case, avoid the DynarchMenu.setup line.
last
Re[2]: JAWS screen reader issue
2005/06/21 17:05
Viewed 17592 times
Replies: 0/0
by allenajs

That is the problem. The browser does not identify itself any differently....just IE. And from what the man told me about it, it does use the DOM of the source to navigate. So that may be the issue. There is a trial version of the software in case you guys could test it. Thanks
last
Google