One of my colleagues came to me with a problem on one of his projects. I can’t help him, due to my lack of experience with screen readers and technology, I turn to you, to the proud and powerful mass of SO users.
Summary for TL users; DR: Our grids in UpdatePanels do not work on screen. Maybe something with the AJAX toolkit?
Can someone help or provide suggestions on what steps we could take next?
Here is what I got from my colleague (my emphasis, not his, hoping to improve the ability to scan):
I am currently working on accessibility and I ran into some problems when I came to pages using Ajax . I used accessibility for reading pages. The screen reader attempts to identify or interpret what is displayed on the screen using audio (text to speech), and then transfers the information to the user. This is very useful for people who are blind, visually impaired, illiterate or learning disabled. Here is a brief summary of how the screen reader works. The screen reader takes a snapshot of the web page and places the content in a virtual buffer. The screen reader uses a virtual buffer to allow the user to navigate through the contents. If the content is modified using scripts, then this must be transmitted to the screen reader. Without a mechanism for detecting that it has been changed, the screen user may not receive notifications that the content has changed at all or it will only be notified that the content has been changed, but you will need to read the entire document to know exactly what has changed. For testing, I used two types of screen readers, Access To Go 3.0.76 and Jaws 10.0.
My results during testing were that on pages that have a gridview in the update panel , a typical search page, for example, the screen reader read, as usual, all the information on the page before the search (search criteria). at the click of a search button, a gridview containing column headers and a result set is created. the screen reader does not receive information that would tell him that the new content was a page, so silence is heard. A technique was recommended by a Microsoft employee, inserting a hidden IFrame in the update panel, which to view update the content and read it. The web site explains how to achieve accessibility only with Office UpdatePanel. Ive tested this technique and had no success in making it work. It displays an iframe, but the screen reader is still not aware of the page refresh.
Our version is AjaxControlToolKit 1.0.11119.0 and does not provide ARIA (an affordable rich Internet Application). Living regions indicate that content changes can occur without an element that has focus and provides technological information on how to handle these content updates. The W3C recommended semantics on how to organize the content of a page, basically providing a role for each element on the page so that technology assistant can provide relevant information to the user. I'm not sure what this means in terms where we are technologically.