Comments on: Accessibility on our site http://www.coactivate.org/projects/opencore/blog/2008/03/24/accessibility-on-our-site/ Just another weblog Sun, 21 Mar 2010 15:29:04 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=wordpress-mu-1.2.5 By: ianb http://www.coactivate.org/projects/opencore/blog/2008/03/24/accessibility-on-our-site/#comment-92 ianb Mon, 24 Mar 2008 16:58:16 +0000 http://www.coactivate.org/projects/opencore/blog/2008/03/24/accessibility-on-our-site/#comment-92 Well, I thought I'd try leaving a comment on this page using NVDA with the screen turned off. Total disaster. But not our fault. The screen reader is just totally messed up. It kept swallowing my keys, but speaking the keys -- if I couldn't read the page I could never have detected this bug. It reads crazy things, like reading out the edit href instead of just "Edit". It was messing everything up. I tried it in IE, thinking maybe it would work better, but it totally messes up the keyboard focus, so you have to tab through a half dozen stupid IE controls to get to the links on the page. I might try another one of the screen readers that is noted, but at this point NVDA is so unusable (at least on the machine I tried it on) that I can't even get to any of the problems with our site in particular. And it's working badly enough that it feels like we'd just be doing workarounds specific to this one product. Are they all messed up in the same way? Well, I thought I’d try leaving a comment on this page using NVDA with the screen turned off. Total disaster. But not our fault. The screen reader is just totally messed up. It kept swallowing my keys, but speaking the keys — if I couldn’t read the page I could never have detected this bug. It reads crazy things, like reading out the edit href instead of just “Edit”. It was messing everything up. I tried it in IE, thinking maybe it would work better, but it totally messes up the keyboard focus, so you have to tab through a half dozen stupid IE controls to get to the links on the page.

I might try another one of the screen readers that is noted, but at this point NVDA is so unusable (at least on the machine I tried it on) that I can’t even get to any of the problems with our site in particular. And it’s working badly enough that it feels like we’d just be doing workarounds specific to this one product. Are they all messed up in the same way?

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