Hi Steve and List. Appreciate some sensible analysis of the potential bias of the survey.
I guess I am left wondering - not having done the survey and not intending to - is this organisation (WebAIM.org), funded by a particular screen reader developer? Certainly: if there is a glaring weakness with Window-eyes, GW need to fix it, but they don't need a potentially vested interest in another company to use its list to trash them. Gw gets enough feedback from its users to know that Window-eyes is failing short with respect to specific web elements. Is there a disclosure from WebAIM.org? Perhaps I should visit for myself! Vaughan. -----Original Message----- From: Steve Jacobson [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, 4 May 2012 9:53 a.m. To: [email protected]; Jared Smith Subject: Re: WebAIM Survey on Screen Readers Jared, This seems not to be completely black or white as the results one gets appears to vary with the version of Internet Explorer one uses and apparently may even work if one uses FireFox. If I understand what you are saying, though, you designed a survey knowing that its design would put users of one of the screen readers about which you were collecting information at a disadvantage. In addition to being accessible, any survey design takes into account the population it surveys to be certain its responses don't contain any biases. Unless I have misunderstood what you have written, it appears that in addition to gathering information, this survey was intentionally designed to sort of whip GW Micro into line regarding this particular accessibility issue. I hope GW Micro addresses this and believe they likely will, but to see a survey designed to highlight a weakness of one of its response sets of that same survey damages credibility in my mind. I base this on your statement in a previous note that this has been known for five years. Something like this could sort of be understood if Window-Eyes' handling of this construct was not known, but that appears to me to not have been the case. I apologize if I have understood what you have said, though. Best regards, Steve Jacobson On Thu, 3 May 2012 13:18:00 -0600, Jared Smith wrote: >Thank you for the feedback Jim. Some very good functionality described >here. However, the real benefit of fieldsets and legends are that they >can provide the description of a grouping of form controls when those >form controls are accessed directly. When you tab to a radio button in >a fieldset, the fieldset legend should be read. Window-Eyes does not >support this. All other screen readers do. >You are correct that Window-Eyes users can navigate by fieldsets. They >can navigate by forms. And they can manually enter Browse mode and find >the fieldset legend themselves. But the fact that this vital >information is not presented in context with the grouped form controls >while navigating the form poses a distinct barrier to Window-Eyes >users. >I have now received 5 e-mails and several other survey comments from >Window-Eyes users who have had less-than-optimal experiences with our >fully standards compliant survey form. Users of other screen readers >have described it as "the most accessible survey I've ever taken." I'm >not trying to pick a fight, I'm simply suggesting that Window-Eyes >would provide a much more accessibility experience for its users if it >supported fieldset accessibility while navigating a form. >Jared Smith >WebAIM.org >If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original >sender only. 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