OK, this is going to be a bit of a rant, but please read it all because you will hopefully find it interesting and important.
About ten years ago, a new concept was invented. It was called Web 2.0. It isn't a new "version" of the web, but rather a new approach to what the web is and what it can do. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the web was simply a portal for reading and editing basic information, but around 2008 or so, this began tochange with the advent of Facebook, Twitter and more comprehensive websites. People started using the web for everything from banking to advanced document creation to even viewing and manipulating the files on other devices. To keep up with this, The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) created Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA). Many web developers saw the need to use nonstandard controls on their websites. For example, rather than having a button that advanced a user to a completely different page to see information, they wanted to have controls that expanded and collapsed different parts of a page. To let screen reader users know exactly what they were seeing, ARIA can be used to tell the screen reader and the blind user something like, "Hey. This is a nonstandard control. Just think of it as a button and you'll be okay. And by the way, right now, it's open, so there's more information to see on this page." Web developers can use ARIA to give sections of their pages custom region names. As an example, go to the Training Downloads Page of the Freedom Scientific website. A few years after ARIA came along, HTML5 (the latest version of the markup language used to code websites) was released. This gave web developers a lot of new semantic tools to play with because it was hoped that they would use to identify different parts of their pages so that one day, when AI would be advanced enough to read and comprehend webpages themselves, they would be able to more easily analyse websites using these semantic tags. Have you ever heard JAWS say something like "article" or "content information"? There are also tags for naming regions. These are some of the new tags in HTML5, but be aware that sometimes JAWS does not speak the correct name for the tag, which is one reason why JAWS is only somewhat standards-compliant. In JAWS 2018, you have the ability to customize what tags JAWS speaks aloud. To see this, go to Settings Center > Web/HTML/PDF > Reading > Customize Web Verbosity Levels or something like that. So how do ARIA and HTML5 go together to announce regions? The answer is that they often overlap. This page (https://dequeuniversity.com/assets/html/jquery-summit/html5/slides/landmarks.html) explains this in greater detail and may be of more use to the people doing the web design. It is somewhat strange that we can access this page as it is part of a paid course, but it came up in Google search results. So, to summarize, if at all possible, the web developers should embrace both HTML5 and ARIA to make the most accessible website possible. Sorry for the long explanation. On 1/9/18, JM Casey <crystallo...@ca.inter.net> wrote: > Hi everyone. > > > > I was recently talking to some people designing a website, and attempting > to > describe the experience using a screen-reader. I explained about quick > navigation, the virtual cursor/buffer, and the various types of elements to > which a screen-reader can quickly position its reading cursor. Although I > have yet to talk to the actual developer, and I think he might have a > greater understanding of this, I was unable to adequately describe a > "region", and how navigating by regions, or quickly jumping to the "main > region", has become essential on, for example, my bank website, which is > full of junk. Essentially, nobody seemed very familiar with this idea of > "regions". > > > > I found this page: > https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices/examples/landmarks/region.html > > Which provides a decent explanation. I'm still only vaguely sure what aria > is, though. > > Does anyone familiar with web-coding on the list feel like chiming in, I > wonder? > > > > > > For answers to frequently asked questions about this list visit: > http://www.jaws-users.com/help/ > For answers to frequently asked questions about this list visit: http://www.jaws-users.com/help/
