Microsoft Edge with JAWS 16 behaves erratically when focus in on an input field on several websites

Question

While JAWS 16 is running on windows 10 system. Tested multiple websites on Edge. And everything goes as following:

1. Click on input, setting focus on that input. Cursor is visible but blinking at a slightly higher speed.
2. After a few seconds(less than 10) the page refreshes forcefully. NO KEYSTROKES ARE VISIBLE IN THE FIELD but JAWS does talks back a few if not all.
3. After the page refreshes, repeat Step 1
4. Page refresh again but this time, the website crashes and gives out a not found page.

Any help on this would be great.

PS: The same websites work on lower versions of internet Explorer and JAWS 14 combo.

You can take any website with input-field accessible to user. The above mentioned issue was tested by me on Stack Overflow, Bing etc. This does work on Google.com for some reason.

Answer 1

JAWS official Support page: https://www.freedomscientific.com/Support/TechnicalSupport/Windows10Upgrade

http://www.ssbbartgroup.com/blog/release-of-the-windows-10-edge-browser-what-it-means-for-accessibility-and-aria-support-in-ie/

Even as this official MSDN blog reveals http://blogs.msdn.com/b/accessibility/archive/2015/07/03/windows-10-upgrade-considerations-for-screen-reader-and-magnifier-users.aspx

Microsoft suggests using IE instead of Edge for better accessibility. For now I guess this is the only answer to my problem.

Hope this helps anyone else facing similar issues.

Answer 2

Windows 10 Anniversary has made improvements to integration with the first-party screen reader Narrator:

This was the only screen reader that was fully functional using Microsoft Edge. It was also the only screen reader that was able to read every active element and all text on each website and application.

compared to third-party screen readers including NVDA:

Microsoft Edge was only able to read active elements, not text, on the screen. It was also difficult to read text on other applications.

and JAWS:

JAWS does not work with Microsoft Edge unless you're using the touch cursor.

And made the following improvements to Microsoft Edge:

Edge supports a new accessibility architecture, and provides modern web accessibility standards so that developers can more easily build accessible sites. It supports tagged PDF files, and includes improvements to features such as the address bar, tabs, windows, and Favorites.

Disabled Text Size support for the web platform on mobile, and enabled pinch to zoom support on all web pages.

We no longer compute accessible description to the same value as name for explicit ARIA roles and intrinsic controls.

EdgeHTML 15 now correctly maps images with an empty HTML “alt” attribute to the presentation role, per the W3C HTML Accessibility API Mappings.

With regards to crashing, Developer Mode also has similar issues:

If you encounter problems enabling Developer Mode or Device Portal, see the Known Issues forum to find workarounds for these issues.

To fix this:

1.       Open the Settings app.
2.       Click on “Apps & features”
3.       Choose “Manage Optional features”
4.       Press the button “Add a feature”
5.       Select the package for Windows Developer Mode
6.       Click “Install”
7.       Reboot your PC
8.       Launch Command Prompt as Administrator
9.       Run: sc config debugregsvc start=auto

Finally, return to the “For Developers” Settings page. You will still see the error code, 0x80004005 but you should now be able to enable Windows Device Portal and the Device Discovery features.

References

• Ranking Screen Readers In Windows10 Anniversary Update: The Results Will Surprise You!

• Accessibility improvements in EdgeHTML 15 - Microsoft Edge Dev Blog

• Enabling Developer Mode fails with error code 0x80004005

• Enable your device for development

• Make F12 tools in Internet Explorer 11 or Edge accessible for screen readers again – Customer Feedback for Microsoft Accessibility

• UI Automation API Reference (Windows)

• Accessible text requirements

• Microsoft Highlights Accessibility Improvements in the Windows 10 Anniversary Update

• w3c/html-aam: HTML Accessibility API Mappings Github repo