We have developed a small GWT 1.5.2 application to implement an intranet inside our portal. It consists of two panes, content and navigation/search; implemented as a HorizonatalSplitPanel containing a ScrollPanel for the content and a DecoratedTabPanel which contains a Tree for the navigation. So far, so good.
For mouse-wielding sighted users, it all works as expected. Clicking TreeItems in the navigation causes the content ScrollPanel to get new content. For keyboard-wielding screen-reader users, however, it's not so good. One can tab around to get focus to the navigation. One can arrow-key around the navigation tree to update the content pane (sighted users can see the content pane updating). But the updates to the content pane are inaudible in the screen-reader JAWS. After reading the documentation at http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/doc/latest/DevGuideA11y.html , I added the following lines to the constructor for our content ScrollPanel: com.google.gwt.user.client.Element e = this.getElement(); Accessibility.setRole(e, "document"); Accessibility.setState(e,"aria-live", "rude"); Accessibility.setState(e,"aria-atomic", "true"); Accessibility.setState(e,"relevant", "additions"); I've also tried with role="region", with other rudeness levels, and without the aria-atomic and relevant attributes. I've verified that the html delivered to the browser does contain the correct attributes on the div (div class="contentBrowserPanel" relevant="additions" aria- atomic="true" aria-live="rude" role="document" style="overflow: auto; position: relative;"). According to http://wiki.codetalks.org/wiki/index.php/How_to_use_ARIA_Live_Regions_for_dynamic_content , this should do exactly what I want. But still no love from the JAWS. We are using Windows XP, Firefox 3, IE 7, and JAWS 11. I thought the problem might be that JAWS is confused with the iframes GWT used to implement the HorizontalSplitPanel. But my visual-impaired user who originally reported the problem reports that none of JAWS iframe-reading commands caused it to properly read the content pane. Has anyone run into similar issues? I saw one post where the author just decided to make a non-AJAX version available from a hidden link. We may have to go that route eventually, but I was hoping there is a simple solution. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Web Toolkit" group. To post to this group, send email to google-web-tool...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to google-web-toolkit+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-web-toolkit?hl=en.
