[Athen] JavaScript events related to Screen Reader Virtual Cursor

[Bossley, Peter A.]

In short, the answer to your main question is “probably not.” – when screen readers are reading the text of a web page they aren’t actually focusing any of the content on the page. JAWS does have a setting, disabled by default, to have the mouse follow the virtual cursor. If that were enabled you might get mouse events but such would be a bad thing to rely on for a number of reasons.

My suggestion is to not automatically dismiss your notification; either on focus or otherwise. Doing so is problematic for reasons you have already discovered e.g. text disappearing in the middle of being read. If you need to draw user’s attention to that text, you should focus the text and have a keyboard and screen reader accessible method for dismissing the notification, if desired.

From: athen-list <athen-list-bounces at mailman12.u.washington.edu> On Behalf Of Vaibhav Saraf
Sent: Tuesday, June 15, 2021 12:23 PM
To: athen-list at mailman12.u.washington.edu
Subject: [Athen] JavaScript events related to Screen Reader Virtual Cursor

Hi List Members,

Folks at my organization have decided to implement a toast notification for one of the applications. Though toasts are not considered good for accessibility, they have tried to incorporate most of the accessibility use-cases to it, and advocated to restrict it only to cosmetic updates.

Now here is one interesting problem - When a user hovers or tabs into the notification, its timeout resets. Interestingly when a screen reader user reads the notification with arrow keys, the timeout does not reset and the toast disappears while the user is reading it. And the user can also read the notification using some of the screen reader shortcuts as well.

Are there any events triggered by the virtual cursors of screen readers which can be handled to determine the presence of the user on the toast body and reset its timeout?

Thanks,
Vaibhav

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