The keynote speakers for lunch today were a few folks from Christal Vision, a vendor (?) for JAWS. They showed us how they worked with the tool. This was the third time I’d seen JAWS touted out during the conference, but this session was really outstanding.
They showed us the virtual viewer, and several of the different shortcuts for navigating the content. One thing I was really quite impressed with was the ability of a user to customize labels for specific controls. Geoff Stevens had mentioned it, and .. Marcia (??) demonstrated in this session. Using scripting, a single user can create a custom label for a single input element on a specific site. I was sitting next to Pat Ramsey, and our minds were both whirring in the same direction. I asked the question, “can these types of settings be imported?”
How excited I was to hear that ‘yes’!
One of our major challenges in forms is how to share instructional text with users in forms mode. simple things like “e.g. cat OR dog”. Do they go in the label, and then get positioned someplace? Do you not use a label, but use a title instead? It seems providing the content for a screen reader user is at odds with users of other assistive technologies (or none at all). Yesterday I asked Geoff if it would be helpful for a web application to provide “tips for optimizing your experience with this application and JAWS” — encouraging users to change their preferences for your site. My concern with that was that people would not want to change their settings just for your site. Well hello — the idea of being able to create a set of custom labels may solve those issues! Regardless of the user’s verbosity settings, you could recommend they import these custom labels, and you have provided that additional information to help them!
Someone also mentioned Firevox, and right on cue, Charles Chen walked in (he’d heard his name being mentioned). He has created a screen reader for Firefox that has some additional capabilities. Even though it looks as though there are some benefits to gearing towards JAWS (market share and all that), this may be a good alternative to offer…
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