February 23, 2017
Making Text Read in a Tab Order
Comments
(0)
February 23, 2017
Making Text Read in a Tab Order
Newbie 9 posts
Followers: 16 people
(0)

Text captions don’t show up in your tab order – they’re not interactive and the screen readers don’t care how you want them read.

On the JAWS and NVDA screen readers the reading order is a bit weird –  it reads from left to right and slightly up – meaning if you have two columns of text in one text caption like this:

1

the reader will read “One Four Two Five Three Six”

Two separate text captions with the same layout as above

2

May read the same way as above, or might read correctly (if the second text caption is positioned “just right”), or might read “One Four Five Six One Two Three” or some variant on that, depending on how the screen reader picks up the captions.

If you want text to read in a specified order  other than top to bottom, left to right – use smart shapes activated as buttons (make the action “No Action ” the button won’t work anyway because smart shapes are not 508 compliant) and tab order the smart shapes (the tab order will get read even though the shapes won’t even tab in most cases – weird,  right?).

3

Just remember to put the text in the alt text area of the accessibility pop up, or it won’t read the text, just some randomly assigned identifier from Captivate. If for any reason smart shapes aren’t reading in tab order, you can place transparent text buttons over each text caption with the alt text inserted in the button’s accessibility pop-up and set your reading order by button. Just remember you need to uncheck auto-fill for your text p captions to make them invisible to the screen reader. or it will read the button text and the text in the captions.

0 Comments
Add Comment