[Xerte] Re: Xerte online toolkits and Jaws

[Ian.Lindsay]

Hi Julian,

Thanks for agreeing to help me on this. I'd best make clear from the start though that my main experience is PHP/MYSQL/JS type development and not in Flash (or perhaps I'm just getting the excuses in early) :)

Anyway, I've had a look at XMLEngine.fla file and I've made some changes which have really improved things in Jaws, or at least they have here on our installation. From what I could tell the accessibility stuff worked quite well when things were "spoken" by the screen reader, the problems were in the user managing to reach this point. Once the element had been spoken (or in some cases giving focus to an element was enough) Jaws would then pick up the information for that element. On initial page load though, Jaws wasn't labelling most of the buttons at all (you can use the INSERT + F5 shortcut to see how Jaws perceives a page).

With these changes Jaws now labels the buttons correctly on page load for volume, volume slider, contents button, continue button, and also the close/go to page buttons once the table of contents is loaded. I added an entry in the English.xml file so I could get separate labels for the volume background and volume slider - I'm not sure this is necessarily the right approach and whether it would be possible instead to add a third property to the volumeControl field in English.xml instead?

The only part I haven't yet been able to solve is the Table of contents list element which still shows as unlabelled in Jaws. Adding the following into the XMLEngine.fla file I just attached at line 3608 should have fixed this I thought, but I got no joy.

this.toc_mc. tocList._accProps = new Object();
this.toc_mc. tocList._accProps.name = engine.languageData.toc[0]. contentsList [0].description;
Accessibility.updateProperties();

I've attached my version of the XMLEngine.fla and English.xml files so you can have a look. As I said earlier I'm not really a Flash developer so any comments as to whether I've gone the right way about this are gratefully received.

Thanks,
Ian



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