screen reader testers needed!

[jadelennox]

I've made a modified version of the account creation page in order to address bug 1016. I've tested it with JAWS 10 and nVDA, but I know my experience testing as a sighted user is imperfect and doesn't really produce the experience of knowledgeable full-time screen reader users.

I'd love to get several testers trying out this page, with only a multitude of testers with a variety of tools. Because the new page uses WAI-ARIA accessibility encoding, it will have extra features that are only available to people using the newest tools(for example JAWS 10). However, it should still be reporting accurate errors for people using screen readers that don't have WAI-ARIA functionality.

If you are a screen reader user, I would love it if you test that page. Try a bunch of things. Try to create accounts both correctly and incorrectly. Try to create accounts with bad passwords or usernames you've already used. Let me what works and what doesn't!

(You should know something I discovered to much frustration during testing: if you test to make sure that it insists you be over 13 based on your birthday, and then you try again with a much older birthday, the system has a timeout to make sure that you aren't just gaming the system and changing the year of your birth.)

Let me know how the tests go, and tell me what screen reader/operating system/browser combination you are using.

Thank you so much!

Comments

[not_a_sniglet]

Testing now. Will have results to add to this comment momentarily. OS is WINXP SP3, Screen reader is JAWS 10 and Browser is Mozilla Firefox 3.5 I think. Whatever the latest Firefox update is.

And testing completed. That page is beautiful. Just absolutely wonderful. We created an account, and then tested on bad birthdays, bad passwords etc and it seems that the form works and works properly. Beautiful beautiful.

[jadelennox]

thank you so much! That's very helpful. And like Yvi said below, yes, it's just a test installation.

[not_a_sniglet]

And uh if you made an account using that test page, does it actually create an actual account? Or does it just look like it did? Because if it created an actual account I'm going tohave to go poke support folks because I created an account, didn't get a confirmation and have forgotten the pw I used because I thought it was a test. :O

[yvi]

It's on the original poster's Dreamhack, which means that while you did create a real account it's not connected to dreamwidth.org. You probably didn't get an e-mail because the e-mail system is not set up for many of the Dreamhacks and only used when testing something related to e-mails.

[not_a_sniglet]

Thank goodness. I thought we were going nuts. <3

Thank you Yvi!

[sophie]

For reference, if you need to tell whether you're on the real site or not, look at the URL. On a Dreamhack, the URL will have "hackname.hack.dreamwidth.net" instead of "dreamwidth.org", where "hackname" is the username of whoever's Dreamhack it is (which can differ from their DW username).

[lightgetsin]

Yeah, that was my bug I believe because I cornered

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Yeah, that was my bug I believe because I cornered <user="synecdochic"> at a party and talked her ear off about it. My problem has always been that my Jaws cursor jumps inexplicably around the form as I'm filling it out -- e.g. I'm sitting in the confirm password field, and it just pops me down to the day of the month. That is still happening in this version. It also just feels funny as I arrow up and down it. Tabbing from field to field is okay, but if I arrow in and out of fields and up and down, I sometimes don't get every line of text between the fields, and then I come back and I do. D and I talked about this and she had a few guesses about why, which of course I now don't remember. It's not intrinsic to the dynamically updating nature of the form, I do know that.

I might also suggest moving the error messages up above the table with the form, rather than leaving them below, because it took me a second of 'eh...?' to find them.

Jaws 10.latest/IE 7.

[jadelennox]

Ah, poop. That's one of the things that's harder for me to test, because I've been having trouble understanding the Jaws cursor at all. I thought it was me not understanding Jaws, but maybe it's just the form itself. Is there some publicly accessible web form you can point me to somewhere in which Jaws works correctly?

Also, I wanted the error messages to be above the table, but what I found was that the only way I could get Jaws to automatically announce them to me (using Jaws 10, Firefox 3.5, Jaws default configuration) was if I put them exactly where they were. Is that me misunderstanding Jaws? I wanted to make sure that it was very clear to people what the errors were because the bug as framed by chameleon was that the error messages were difficult to find or didn't announce. What's the best way to make this happen?

Thank you so much for making the time.

[lightgetsin]

Do you mean re the error messages that when they appear Jaws announces them automatically? Because I'm not getting that, hrm.

For a form that works, oh, hmm. Well, I mean, it's simpler, but the log in screen for gmail works perfectly. As do polls on both LJ and DW. Re cursors: it's actually the PC cursor that's hopping, not the Jaws cursor (though I suppose the Jaws cursor might be moving and I wouldn't know it). PC cursor = my focus point, visually invisible. Jaws cursor = mouse pointer.

Also, poking at it again, I find that when I enter the form and tab field to field filling it in, it works very nicely all the way through except at the very last tab from checkbox to the button at the bottom, the tab to the button doesn't work. Jaws doesn't announce the button when you tab, though if I arrow over it it is clearly there and properly identified. I have no idea about that one, either.