Investigate methods to update JAWS' virtual cursor automatically

[Martin Kou]

CKEditor 3 at its current state is often requiring the user to press Insert+Escape to update the virtual cursor with no warning - users can only know that it's needed by reading our ​user's guide.

But it's not common for users to have read the whole user's guide before using our editor.

While I was reading up on accessibility issues surrounding web applications this morning, I found someone has documented a way to update JAWS' virtual cursor automatically.

The method looks simple. If it works, it should be included into v3.0.

[Martin Kou]

The description of the method can be found here: ​http://juicystudio.com/article/improving-ajax-applications-for-jaws-users.php

[Martin Kou]

I've just tried it out for some time today.

The trick seems to have no effect in Firefox 3.

While the trick seems to have some effect in IE - it seems to cause JAWS to stop reading anything from IE instead. So rather than fixing things, it's breaking things.

A more hopeful way of fixing the update virtual cursor problem could be ARIA Live Regions: ​http://juicystudio.com/article/wai-aria-live-regions.php

We can basically use an ARIA Live Region as a dedicated region to announce text, as shown in the demo here - ​http://test.cita.uiuc.edu/aria/live/live1.php. Test area 2 in the demo link is very close to what we want to do - change the atomic property in test area 2 to false and JAWS will read any newly added text from JavaScript in the region.

ARIA Live Regions are supported by IE8 and Firefox at the moment, however.