[vip_students] FW: [access-uk] Questions about ARIA active elements and progress bars and general screen reader usage in the UK.

From: "Aedan O'Meara" <aedanomeara@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <vip_students@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 11:32:44 -0000
Hi all,
From another list but interesting comparison of screen readers.
Aedan. 


-----Original Message-----
Sent: 25 March 2014 09:27
Subject: [access-uk] Questions about ARIA active elements and progress bars
and general screen reader usage in the UK.

This is two questions in one. If you reply and you are in the UK, I'd be
interested to know what screen reader you use, and also what you think most
other people in the UK might use.

I'm sighted but occasionally fire up a reader to test accessibility changes
to web pages but I am struggling to make ARIA live regions and progress bar
elements work satisfactorily in multiple browsers and readers.

I am running a reasonable specification Windows 8.1 desktop with plenty of
RAM and I installed/updated the current versions of what I think would be
the 4 major readers. Here is what I found:

JAWS 15 was the worst for almost everything - it slowed down my PC, the
default voice was the worst of the bunch, and it wouldn't work with Google
Chrome at all. In fact, starting Chrome and JAWS together almost brought my
PC to a halt. In its favour, it seemed to handle ARIA live regions and
progress bars OK when used in conjunction with Internet Explorer 11 or the
current Firefox.

NVDA 2014.1 was next and immediately became my favourite - it's come on so
far since I last tried it a year ago. Incredibly intuitive, just works right
out of the box and read the live regions perfectly. Not only that, but the
audio cue for any progress bar on the page with an active ARIA progress cue
is to play bleeps over what seems to be about
2 octaves, without interrupting the reader itself. So a thoughtful designer
could set the bar to update every 10 seconds, meaning the user could carry
on reading without interruption, but also get a cue as to progress.

Google Chromevox was also intuitive extremely fast, and came with a good
selection of high quality voices. It handles live regions well but
annoyingly it doesn't seem to give the audio cues of the progress element,
even with ARIA cues enabled, unless you have the focus on the progress
element and keep tapping the CTRL key each time you want an update, at which
point it reads the percentage.

Windows Eyes was slow and I cannot make head or tail of it! Everything I do
just say "left" or "right" or reads the characters.. Will have to work on
this one a bit!

To summarise, I absolutely love the new version of NVDA, but of that is the
opinion of a sighted user interested only in testing web pages within a
browser. And I know not everyone uses it.

So my question is firstly, are there UP TO DATE comparison tables of major
screen reader WAI browser accessibility implementations. Also, is there a
sort of all-in-one super cheat sheet of major screen reader hotkeys for use
in browsers? I've Googled around but can only find quite old versions of the
feature comparison tables.

Finally, I know there are more specific screen reader groups, but I'm
interested to know what screen readers people use and prefer in the UK and
this is a UK-centric accessibility group, so I hope it's close enough!

More info on ARIA live regions if you are interested:
http://www.freedomscientific.com/Training/Surfs-Up/AriaLiveRegions.htm.

Thanks.


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[vip_students] FW: [access-uk] Questions about ARIA active elements and progress bars and general screen reader usage in the UK.

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