Updated ARIA-spiced form example to work in IE 8

Marco — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 12:53:22 +0000

I updated my simple form example from the third Easy ARIA Tip to also work in IE 8. I had to explicitly state a doc type to put IE out of quirks mode into proper IE 8 mode, and I also had to change the type attribute’s value of the script tag to “text/javascript” from “application/javascript” for it to recognize the functions declared in the script block.

The example works visually, but has a number of accessibility issues which make testing IE 8 with it a not so pleasant experience:

Neither aria-required nor aria-invalid take any effect with either JAWS or NVDA. It’s as if the attributes weren’t set, yet the IE DOM exposes them correctly, as JAWS’s Element Info keystroke, Insert+Shift+F1, clearly indicates.
Neither JAWS nor NVDA see the alerts come up, and thus don’t speak them. The alerts appear visually, so the JavaScript is working, but the DOM mutation is not being picked up. Only after a refresh in the respective screen readers is the content of these visible in the virtual buffer.

For testing, I used the latest update to JAWS 10, build number 10.0.1142, and NVDA trunk snapshot 2828. And of course, the release version of IE 8.

For those of you doing web application development and testing, this is an indication that your best bet to get proper results is definitely the combination of a strong implementation of ARIA in Firefox and a supporting screen reader.

Marco's accessibility blog » ARIA InternetExplorer8

Updated ARIA-spiced form example to work in IE 8