[Athen] testing with JAWS & NVDA

Howard Kramer hkramer at colorado.edu
Mon Feb 9 15:07:28 PST 2015


Hello All:

This question will get into the technical weeds. I've been testing a few
systems here at UCB with JAWS 15/I.E. 11 and NVDA (ver. 2014.4)/Firefox
(ver. 35.01).

The one issue I came across which is causing confusion is that NVDA does
not read the underscore "_" character out unless you're on the word and
issue the spell command. The underscore "_" is used in a number of foreign
language exams as a "fill in the blank line" placeholder. JAWS reads the
"_" fine, repeating the character only 3 or so times. Even when I turn on
punctuation in NVDA to read "_" always, it still will only read the
characters when a spell command is issued.

Are either of you aware of this issue? Looking at the code I would judge
the text with these characters accessible - yet NVDA seems to have a pretty
hard time finding and reading these characters. Are you aware of an
accessibility best practice that call for using something other than an
underscore "_" for indicating a blank.

Also, noticed that JAWS doesn't seem to work well with FF or is that my
lack of skill with JAWS? NVDA seems to work very well with Firefox - this
is the only glitch I've come across.

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

-Howard



--
Howard Kramer
CO-PI - UDUC
*Promoting the Integration of Universal Design into University Curricula*
(UDUC)
Lecturer, Cont. Ed - Evening & Cred Admin
303-492-8672
cell: 720-351-8668
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