Accessibillity/Usabillity testers

errol187

after recently having a site (that was designed prior to me web enabling it) tested for Accessibillity and Usabillity, I have many ideas - in fact I use 'MANY' lightly... my head is splitting with ideas and opinions. The response that was received via a docuemnt created by the company of testers was (in my eyes) 50% relevant and 50% related to the users preference. I could be wrong though. I am not a Jaws guru so configuration of the application was not the easiest. Especially when the results differed to what you would of expceted to happen. That is another story...

Taking into considerations that it is Jaws 5.0 being used and not the latest version. Bugs were a many when this version appeared - so it is documented anyway. Browsers and how they react differently (well FireFox and Internet Explorer), the two main browsers that are being supported for this project, all be it the latest versions making use of a not so new Jaws version.... Ummm!!!! It was not my choice.... Honest!!!

Rambling over....

What I am trying to say is... who are we developing for and when and who decides if it is acceptable? The tester? The Client? The developer?
Obviously you may come across some issues with bugs etc and browsers - then only to decide that you will either

1) leave it alone... not your problem as is a bug
2) find a work-around (that suits who.. The tester? The Client? The Developer?)

I find myself going round in circles... it is not the lack of positivity but the lack of knowledge from the clients that at this present time is causing me to ramble like a crazed, partly grey (and getting greyer by the day) developer... ;0)

Issue....

Jaws reads continuously across page - this alone is an annoying issues seeing as one minute it pauses and the next it refuses to do as it is expected. This is one issue I would like some feedback on. The elements are labels and spans embedded in div tags. They are laid out from left to right in colunms of 4 with many rows. The labels which are used as labels to show the descriptive field has semi-colons that separate the two labels. The other adjacent label is just to show the value retrieved from the database. So tell me this... why does Jaws read them all in one single breath? Is there a method or configuration to solve this issue? Presently I am thinking about updating the 'title' attributes to read more detail and hopefully help Jaws users decipher the information read aloud... this is difficult not being a consistent/everyday Jaws user... if you know what i mean. For all I know this may be ok to a majority of Jaws users but it has been raised and is now an issue.

I look forward to your comments.... hopefully it will be ripe with suggestions, negative or positive.

Errol187