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When I open a page in the welcome and tab through the section links in the top banner, JAWS7 does not announce the name of each link. Instead, it reads "icon slash blank link graphic". 1. Open the welcome. 2. Click on one of the section links; for example "Overview". 3. Tab to the Overview link in the banner nav. JAWS7 says "icon slash blank link graphic." I expected it to also say "Overview." 4. Tab to the Tutorials link. JAWS7 says "icon slash blank link graphic", not "Tutorials." The same applies for each of the section links. This is a real problem if you can't see which link is in focus - you have no idea where you are in the banner nav. (FYI - the names of the section links on the root/front page of the welcome do get announced by JAWS7 when I tab through each of them...)
Created attachment 48108 [details] Screen capture of the welcome banner nav items
*** Bug 154252 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Dejan, can I fix this for 3.2.1? I will see if there is a straightforward fix and let you know the risk.
Here's the deal. JAWS appears to have a deficiency when it comes to reading formatted text links. The text of the link is wrapped in a span element in order to give it a class. <A href="http://org.eclipse.ui.intro/showPage?id=overview" class="left nav_link1" id="overview"> <IMG class="background-image" alt="" src="file:///D:/workspaces/3.2.1/org.eclipse.ui.intro/icons/blank.gif"> <DIV class="link-extra-div"></DIV> <SPAN class="link-label">Overview</SPAN> </A> I would consider this a bug in JAWS. There is certainly enough information here to formulate a text description. The obvious workaround is to add alt-text to the IMG. However this has a rather ugly side effect - IE mistakenly treates alt-text as tooltips. Normally this is fine but in this case we already have hover-over text so what happens is you see the welcome hover text, and then a second later the IE tooltip on top of it. It becomes difficult to read and annoying. I could not find any other recommendations or ways to work around this particular problem without adding some risk. So it seems we have to decide whether we want a subset of our users to suffer (those who rely on accessibility) and have to return back to the home page when they want to switch page, or annoy the rest of our users with an unnecessary tooltip. Any thoughts?
I am against using alt-text here.
In that case I think we need to back out for 3.2.1 on this one, if there are no objections. So users who rely on screenreaders will hear some garbage for the page navigation at the top, but they will still be able to access those pages by using the view toolbar buttons (back/next/home) to get back to the home page and select a link from there. Or they can just close and reopen welcome. Either way they won't be stuck; they just won't be able to use this convenience shortcut.
Discussed this issue with the my accessibility contacts on the Constellation/ADC project mgmt team. They agree that "while this problem surely does generate a very poor user experience, due to the existing circumvention it does not break accessibility compliance." I can report compliance on this one for now, but request that it be fixed in Eclipse for the next release.
Alternative workarounds to be explored in 3.3.
Try setting the title to the empty string (sometimes works). The other option is to set the title on the entire link (e.g., <A href="http://org.eclipse.ui.intro/showPage?id=overview" title="Title for everything inside me" class="left nav_link1" id="overview"> <IMG class="background-image" alt="" src="file:///D:/workspaces/3.2.1/org.eclipse.ui.intro/icons/blank.gif"> <DIV class="link-extra-div"></DIV> <SPAN class="link-label">Overview</SPAN> </A> You could also try fixing your HTML so it's valid -- that may be causing JAWS to be unhappy. You can't put a <DIV> (a block level element) inside an <A> tag (which is a span).
Rich, you are absolutely right - we should fix this.
Fixed. I did some more digging on this one. It turns out the problem was with display:none in the CSS. JAWS reads web pages by asking IE what it sees, instead of using the speech/aural CSS as it should. So getting it to read invisible things isn't straightforward. I had to use this workaround: #navigation-links a .link-label { position: absolute; left: -999px; width: 990px; } instead of display:none. It basically moves the text far from the visible screen, but the right border of the box slightly overlaps with the visible region, causing the browsers to think it's visible to the user. This workaround is mentioned on several websites as being the best one. I tested on all the browsers and saw no change in appearance. The screen readers now read it properly. For example, tabbing through the top you'll hear "Overview link, Samples link, ..."
There was a regression - Bug 193335 which was created as a side effect of this bug fix. I think that I can revamp this fix a little so that Bug 193335 is also fixed. If I create a revised fix would someone with access to JAWS be able to verify that this problem is still fixed.
