How Vista manages accessibility issues for visually impaired students:
Vista is tested against U.S. regulation 508 and W3C accessibility standards. Since versions of JAWS older than 3.5 do not support Java, these will not work with Vista. Blackboard used JAWS 3.7 in testing Vista for 508 compliancy. As there are many other screen readers on the market, so Blackboard cannot code specifically for JAWS.
Best practices for using the screen reader “JAWs”:
One of the largest problems encountered when using JAWS occurs when anew Java applet is started. JAWS may fail to respond to keyboard input.
This is alleviated by redirecting the input from the PC to pass through the JAWS program. The term for this is known as "Route PC to JAWS" and is accomplished by pressing Insert + Plus on the number pad. This should be done when changing from one section of the system to a section that is powered by a different applet. Another problem occurs when JAWS begins reading the page. It may not start reading in the upper-left hand corner of the browser window.
While a permanent solution to this is not readily apparent, a workaround would be to ALT + Tab out of the browser and then ALT + Tab back again. This appears to force the input starting point to be the upper-left of the webpage. The largest problem of all is the use of Vista's HTML creator. When this option is enabled, not only does the loading of the applet force the user to initiate the" Route PC to JAWS" action, the user is also bombarded with a multitude of buttons to traverse before getting to the edit box to begin typing a message.
To improve the browsing experience of JAWS users, Vista Support recommends changing the configuration of JAWS. This involves setting JAWS to ignore inline frames, which reduces the number of frames that JAWS reads. The process for this is: From JAWS > Utilities >Configuration Manager > Set Option > HTML Options > Headings and Frames tab > Ignore Inline Frames.
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