Screen readers and <abbr> + title
Hi All,
Am I right in thinking that when presented with a title tag followed by abbr that Jaws favours the title over the abbr?
Looking at the code sample below Jaws 8 reads 'Blahblahblah' rather than "Friday's schedule":
| Code: |
| <a href="/xxxx" title="blahblahblah"><abbr title="Friday's schedule">Fri</abbr></a> |
When accessed with NVDA I get "FRI link description". Not sure if this is due to the combination of title followed by abbr throwing NVDA of course or a quirk.
Any ideas would be great.
Henny
Blog:www.iheni.com
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Hi Henny,
Can't help with this one I'm afraid, but I've put a Twitter request out for you.
Cheers!
Gary
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Iheni, as far as I know Jaws& NVDA do not read ABBR element so in case JAWS is set to read the titles it will do so. Can you please remove the link and see what you hear when you have only the <abbr>?
What browser did you use? I mostly play with Mozilla so I do not know if on IE the behavior is different.
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Hey Henny,
I *think* that what is happening here is that Jaws is set to read out the title of links when present (or when title is longer than the link text). From what I remember of the way Jaws works, you have to switch on expanding abbreviations in the preferences. However, even if this is on, Jaws may not check for the existence of the title attribute on the abbr when trying to figure out which is longer, link text or link title attribute. It looks like NVDA may do this check, but without testing properly, I can't be sure.
Sorry, that's all a bit rambling!
EDIT: One way to test NVDA would be to make the link title attribute longer than the abbr expansion - see if it reads the link's title attribute because it is longer, or still reads the abbr expansion:
| Code: |
| <a href="/xxxx" title="Friday's schedule is longer here"><abbr title="Friday's schedule">Fri</abbr></a> |
And worth checking what Jaws does to these:
| Code: |
| <a href="/xxxx" title="Text in link title attribute is longer"><abbr title="Friday">Fri</abbr></a> |
| Code: |
| <a href="/xxxx" title="Text in link title attribute"><abbr title="Text in abbr title attribute is longer in this one">Fri</abbr></a> |
| Code: |
| <a href="/xxxx" title="Text in link title attribute">Plain link text is longer in this one</a> |
Jon
Jon Gibbins, dotjay.co.uk, accessibility.co.uk wiki.
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Thank you all for your valuable input. I've gone with a hidden heading to help users of various screenreaders with various versions and verbosity set understand teh schedule.
Hoping to have it tested by users and report back.
Blog:www.iheni.com
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Testing back in fall 2010 had shown that support of <abbr> and <acronym> was, at best, inconsistent form one screen reader to another:
- Jaws 10-11: turned off by default (but option available to do so)
Window-Eyes 7.02: turned on by default (but option available to turn off)
NVDA: no support whatsoever (and no options)
VoiceOver: no support whatsoever (and no options)
I haven't tested in more recent versions of these screen readers, but I don't see why this would have changed.
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Nobody tried in standard browser conditions? I just ran into this problem from the opposite direction: hovering your mouse over the link only displays the abbr title text.
Tested in the latest versions of IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari.
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JAWS is reading the <a title> instead of the <a> content due to a setting which chooses the longer of the two. That setting makes it ignore the <abbr title> and the content of the <abbr>. Changing the setting will change that behaviour.
That setting can be useful on websites with lots of "Read More" or "Click Here" links. But only if they provide the name of the target document in the <a title> attribute for each link.
That setting can be very unhelpful. Websites sometimes repeat the link text inside the <a title> attribute with a couple of extra words. These words are often useless, such as "Click here to read about" or "Visit our page about ...". The <a title> attribute is wrong on these websites - avoid repetitive and redundant information.
What is the actual text the original code sample would provide? It seems that the link text is not sufficient, as it's just the name of a day.
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