[Athen] testing with JAWS & NVDA

[Bossley, Peter A. (Pete)]

Howard,
In our experience, JAWS support for firefox is not full-featured like it’s support for IE is; NVDA is the opposite, working much better with FF than IE.


From: athen-list [mailto:athen-list-bounces at mailman13.u.washington.edu] On Behalf Of Howard Kramer
Sent: Monday, February 09, 2015 6:07 PM
To: Access Technology Higher Education Network
Subject: [Athen] testing with JAWS & NVDA

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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