I feel like I’m losing my mind – maybe because I’m hitting my head on the wall.  On my work computer, my primary browser s Chrome.  I just got an upgrade to the chromium Edge, so I’ll try that soon, but assume it’s similar to Chrome.  I also still have IE 11.  I’ve noticed with two different web applications that JAWS voices the same page quite differently in when I use Chrome versus IE.  I feel stuck on doing what I need to do.  Here are a couple examples.  I’d really like to understand from some of you web developer/accessibility people what is going on.

Running Windows 10, JAWS 2020 (soon to be 2021). 

Our time keeping system is not great with JAWS.  The company says it works with NVDA & Firefox, neither of which I have on this laptop and if you use what they call listview instead of the more intuitive table view that  my colleagues use.  If I use IE 11, I can arrow down through this  listview and it reads a button for each date in my pay period, followed by a button where I can code whether I took a vacation day or such.  This format makes some sense.  If I click the button for pay code, it seems to open a small dialog  associated to the corresponding date where is shows each type of code an the number of hours, such as 8 hours of vacation. 

Because I’m having some issues with the menu to pick a code type, I thought I’d go try it in Chrome.  In Chrome, the same page reads very differently.  Arrowing down through the page only has one option for each day of the pay period and JAWS says its’ a menu.  I have yet to figure out how to access this menu, as all my normal tricks aren’t working.  I’ll likely call AIRA for visual help as a temporary work around.

On SharePoint sites we use internally, There are tabs at the top that bring up different ribbons of buttons for editing and working with pages.  In IE, these tabs JAWS sees as Links and will bring up in the links list, then I can use B to move to each button.  In Chrome, these tab labels do not come up as links and I have to find them in other ways that are more clunky and seems to trigger Forms mode. 

Is this expected?  I’m surprised that the same elements on a page would be rendered so differently in different browsers.  I’m really trying to embrace Chrome, but find some web coding more clunky and in the case of my time keeping system, not seemingly accessible.  Would Firefox really render this another way that could potentially work better with JAWS?  I’ll have to ask for an exception to get Firefox installed and not even sure if it will be an improvement. 

Thoughts?

Robin Van Lant, Sr. Program Manager - Sales Enablement

Key Equipment Finance & Key Institutional Bank

720-304-1060