Over the years we’ve had a number of folks try out the jQueryUI accessible widgets to check for compatibility and bugs. To make this a bit easier I wanted to provide some guidance about the kinds of information we would need to make the test results useful. In general we use Firefox on Windows with NVDA as our baseline and also give things a whirl on Jaws and VoiceOver. One issue with testing in Jaws is that it attempts to ‘help’ by doing silent repairs of what it finds under the hood, which can both mask bad markup and also introduce phantom errors. NVDA and VoiceOver are both more literal in their interpretation and give a better indication of correct coding. We also deviate to some extent from the jQuery philosophy of trying to smooth over differences between browsers and platforms. While the goal is laudable, in the accessibility world it’s not really achievable without piles of hackery to overcome broken or missing support. The volume of additional code and the extreme brittleness would make these kinds of solutions break the future-proofing of our implementation. So after a bit of debate we decided to go for a correct and best-practice approach which may not always work in all browsers, platforms and AT but should work once full support and debugging of those layers is complete.
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