Hey everybody,
The ARIA spec provides two roles, "application" and "document"
intended to provide cues for assistive technologies to change modes.
Indeed. As it happens, a few weeks ago, I was testing the keyboard ally
of dojo's slider with FF3 and IE8 beta, and JAWS10 to see if and when
automatic mode changes occur. The purpose was threefold: (1) is dojo
was marking things up correctly? (2) is the browser publishing the
correct events to MSAA? and (3) is JAWS responding appropriately? I've
sent the results to dojo a11y, IBM JAWS testers, and Freedom Scientific.
In point form, the major features of the test page are:
- Two main divisions, one marked with role="document", the other with
role="application".
- Two sliders within each division.
- The second slider in both cases has two associated text regions that
update dynamically as the value of the slider changes.
- One of the dynamic text regions is an <input type="text">, while the
other is a <span>.
- The sliders within the document division are, in turn, nested inside a
<form> element.
Note: the reason for the dynamic text regions associated with a slider
was to see if multiple events confused JAWS. There was a claim that if
an <input type="text"> changed as the slider itself changed, then JAWS
would see two events and report both (which is a bad thing). That
didn't happen.
The test page is here:
http://clown.atrc.utoronto.ca/Fluid/dojo/dijitSliderTest.html
A summary of the results is that manually setting "virtual cursor auto"
mode in JAWS works for both browsers, and manually setting "virtual pc
cursor off" works in terms of keystrokes, but not speech. This is true
regardless of whether the slider is within a "document" or an
"application" <div>. Without manually setting a mode, starting in
"virtual cursor auto" mode, and just tab navigating, the sliders work
when within a <div> whose role is "application", but not within a <div>
with role="document".
If you want the detailed results, let me know.
Finally, regarding automatic mode switching and aria roles, there should
be a change in mode when tab navigating to a widget regardless of the
surrounding markup. The aria best practices guide states, "If your page
has only a few isolated widgets, like pop-up calendars located on a Web
page, it is not necessary to expressly set the role of application on
the body. Screen readers, based on widget roles, must be able to provide
access to these widgets without recognizing the entire page as an
application."
--
;;;;joseph
'This is not war -- this is pest control!'
- "Doomsday", Dalek Leader -
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