JAWS wide open

I, and many others like me, have long wrestled with this beast and others of its kind. Attempting to tease out the rhyme and reason of its behavior.  To understand why it does what it does. To understand how it does what it does. To understand how it ticks. To understand.

Introducing the JAWS open issue tracker

From experience, we at TPGi believe strongly that having access to an open issue tracker for software, to raise an issue or request a feature implementation, is a very important aspect of improving user experience through interoperable implementation of web standards. We at TPGi are active contributors to browser and, where available, assistive technology issue trackers, filing issues on HTML, ARIA, CSS and SVG feature implementations and bugs. We also work within the web standards community to help define the standards that software implementers use to ensure interoperability and accessibility.

Recently we have been working with our colleagues at Freedom Scientific to bring the same sense of open dialogue we enjoy with other web software implementers to JAWS. This has taken the form of an open issue tracker for the JAWS screen reader. The Vispero Standards Support repo is a public space where anybody can file an issue on JAWS support for HTML, CSS, ARIA and SVG. We at TPGi will then work to triage issues raised to identify whether they represent an issue with JAWS or their source lies in browser, markup or user understanding. Where we find JAWS issues we will file bugs with the JAWS developers and update the public issues with information on milestones for a fix or reasons for not fixing etc. We will, of course, encourage our colleagues at Freedom Scientific to contribute directly to the open issue tracker.

Reporting issues

If you find an issue with JAWS support for ARIA, CSS, HTML, or SVG, please file an issue with the following information:

• Concise title that summarizes the issue
• Brief description of the issue
• JAWS version
• Name and version of the OS and browser
• Expected result
• Actual result
• Test case that demonstrates the issue – provide a linked test case codepen/JSbin etc.

Note: please do not file general support issues here. Please contact Freedom Scientific Technical Support to report general issues with JAWS.

Support Documentation

As part of the issue tracker repository we are developing documentation and test cases which informs anybody that may find it of interest of the feature support in JAWS for web technologies.

So far we have made a start on:

• HTML
• ARIA

Note: This is very much a work in progress, which will be continually updated. Forks and pull requests more than welcome.