[wac] JAWS 10 to support ARIA live regions

[Ken Petri]

All,

Big news: JAWS 10 will support ARIA live regions and the beta is here:

http://www.freedomscientific.com/downloads/jaws/JAWS-public-beta.asp

Live regions allow for the screen reader to announce when portions of
the page get updated with new content. As you know, many modern web
applications and sites do this, so the potential impact for designers
and users is large and represents a big step toward making more
compelling web experiences for screen reader-reliant users.

Live regions was one of the most important parts of the W3C Accessible
Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) not yet implemented in main stream
screen readers. (Firefox's in-browser Fire Vox has had live regions
for a while but is not widely used.) You can bet that Window Eyes and
Dolphin Hal will follow suit quickly.

Here is a description of live regions from the W3C Web Accessibility
Initiative (WAI) ARIA working draft:

http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/#liveregions

It is important that developers don't think that because one main
stream screen reader supports live regions in a beta version that we
have a green light to AJAX-ify all our sites and applications.
However, there is no question that this is a big step toward creating
user experiences that are virtually equivalent regardless of means of
access. And ARIA appears to be the way forward for accessibility for
modern applications.

Probably the best place to begin looking into Live Regions and the
ARIA specification is Mozilla's ARIA page:

http://developer.mozilla.org/en/Accessible_DHTML

Firefox was the first browser to support ARIA, though ARIA support is
now in the developer version of Webkit (the rendering engine for
Safari), the latest versions of Opera, and is planned for IE 8 (the
Freedom Scientific site for JAWS 10 says IE 8 works with live regions
already).

Ken
-------------------------------------------------------
 Ken Petri
 Program Director
 OSU Web Accessibility Center
 102D Pomerene Hall
 1760 Neil Avenue
 Columbus, Ohio 43210
 Phone: (614) 292-1760
 Fax: (614) 292-4190
 mailto:petri.1 at osu.edu
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