Is there anything that shows what works/doesn't for various screenreader/browser combinations?

Question

I'm enhancing the UI for an application to be more compatible with screen readers. The problem is I keep running into issues and I'm beginning to suspect that it' due to the screen reader itself.

Right now I'm mostly testing JAWS 15 with IE 8 (due to corporate limitations it's basically all I can test with at the moment) and getting some weird behavior, but as near as I can tell the aria markup and html all look correct.

For instance:

• In some hidden divs (role="alert") the JAWS does not speak "button" after reading a button's name after the DIV is show. (It does speak "button" once you tab to the button though.)
• JAWS is speaking elements with aria-hidden="true," which was fixed according to this thread.
• Again with hidden alert divs, in some cases JAWS will repeatedly speak elements. In at least one case it will repeat the header and the first line of text infinitely (or at least until my patience ran out.)
• The altText for images in table is not read when the entire page is first read. It does get read when the user navigates through the table with the table commands though. I don't even know what corret behavior is on this one...

I'm basically looking for something where I can find out if these are known issues with JAWS/IE8. And if there's a list of compatibility out there (similar to the HTML5 compatibility list) I'll be able to refer to it whenever people bring these issues up.

Answer 1

http://html5accessibility.com/ is a starting point to discover whether a browser has accessibility support for native elements and attributes.

If you're looking for documentation of screen reader support for ARIA attributes, check out The Paciello Group. For example, Steve Faulkner published a post on role=alert that may be helpful.