Forum Discussion
Screen reader skipping focus order items
Hey,
I'm currently developing an accessible course for a client and am facing an issue with the screen reader (Jaws) skipping to the end of the focus order due to items animating in.
To lift our courses we stagger objects animating on and this only gets more complicated as the course transitions. It seems that the screen reader is landing on each page and looking for the first item in the list that is showing. This is currently the objects in the master slide but they have been put at the end of the focus order to save a user from going through them every page. Due to the screen reader skipping to these items a user then has to know to go back through the list to the beginning to navigate through the focus order correctly? (surely they will never know to do this and get stuck)
Am I missing something or is the only way to get this to work correctly to either have everything on screen start at the beginning of the timeline or have the master slide assets at the top of the list to prevent the skipping and have a user run through these on every single page?
I've attached the first page as an example.
Any help or advice would be appreciated!
Thanks
Yeah - this works best for clients who are most concerned about the screenreader reading everything immediately - which makes sense!
Yeah if they are features like that, I would definitely keep them in your list and just throw them at the end :) Let me know if you have any other questions. I've done tons of accessibility and have work arounds for allllll the issues haha!
Hi George - you're right. The screenreader is missing the content because it is not actually on the slide yet. The best way to fix this is to put all the text off the slide with no animation AS WELL as keeping the text on slide. All the text on the slide - uncheck the "item is visible to accessibility tools" checkbox. So the only thing the screenreaders see is the text that is off slide and you have no issue with someone using a screenreader having to wait for the text to fade in.
Then have you master slide items at the end of the list. Additionally - are you sure you want the master slide items to be visible to the screen reader at all? If its repetitive information that is not improving someone's experience, best practice would be to nix it from being viewed by the screenreader.
Ah ok, so that's a nice work around however it does mean the user cant use there mouse to click text for any alt text but this is a nice work around for complicated solutions with lots of layers and assets.
With the master slide, I agree its irritating to have repeated features on every page but if they are buttons such as "exit course" surely we still need these on the list so a user can navigate to this with the keyboard otherwise the buttons wont be accessible or am I wrong? Thanks for you help!
