Accessibility issue about the full number pagination

yyli

Hi,

I am using DataTables 1.9, which is announced to be fully accessible. But when I use full number pagination, JAWS reads the numbered pages as links for the first time. After I select one page, it starts reading the subsequent pages as only numbers, like 2, 3, 4 etc.

Can anyone help, Please!

Thanks!

allan

Hi,

Thanks for your question - but in future, please follow the forum rules and post a question only once.

Regarding the error, can you try DataTables 1.10 please, I've had some feedback on the accessibility aspect and made some improvements. However, I'm not a screenreader user myself, so there might still be improvements to be made. Suggestions are very welcome.

I have found that working with screen readers is like working with CSS around the year 2000. Every implementation is massively different...

Allan

yyli

Hi Allan,

First of all, I am sorry that I posted the question twice. I posted in DataTables 1.9 first, but then thought it might be a more general issue. My apologies!

I will definitely try 1.10 version and see if it will work. I work for older blind people, so this feature is a must.

Thanks for your quick reply Allan. I really appreciate what you have done, and this plugin is a god-sent bless for me and saves me tons of time. 　

allan

Brilliant! Great to hear that it generally works well for you, and yes please. I would hugely appreciate feedback on getting the ARIA aspect correct (or at least as much as it is possible, given how subjective it appears to be!). Any feedback you have from your users would be of great benefit to us all so I can improve DataTables core.

Allan

yyli

I just tried the version 10, but the problem still exists. When one page link is selected, JAWS just skipped the rest of the page links, and went to the next section. :(

Any other ideas? Any suggestions are appreciated.

allan

Can you tell me what exactly happens and what you are doing to trigger this (I don't have a Windows machine available just at the moment).

I'm guessing that the moment you are:

1. Clicking, or using the keyboard, to activate the page '2' paging button
2. JAWS then reads '2, 3, 4, 5'?

That's a very weird thing for it to do! It should just read the pagination info "Showing 10 to 19 of 57 records".

Allan

yyli

Yes Allan.

What I did was to turn on JAWS, use tab to focus on the link of page number 1, and then press enter key, which was how JAWS selects and opens a link. It showed me the content on the page 1, but then when I tabbed again, JAWS read the rest of page links as numbers all at once, like 2,3,4...then JAWS skipped the data table, and started reading the next section, which is the right navigation bar on the page.

I am using JAWS 13 and IE 11, and here's the link of the website: http://watap.org/tryout/products.php?cat=3, in case it's helpful.

Thanks for helping me troubleshoot. Let me know if you need anything else from me.

allan

I'll have access to a Windows machine next week. I'll see if I can try it out then, but I've got to confess, I'm sure sure how much I'll be able to do there - it sounds like its how JAWS works...

Allan

jrichview

We too are interested in this issue. We're being dinged on 508 compliance due to the paging controls and the focus rectangle. The interesting thing is that the next/prev buttons work fine, but if you tab to the numeric page buttons and hit ENTER, the focus is transferred back to the top of the page as if it were an entirely new page.

There's also a minor issue with focus remaining on a disabled pager button as well. "First" and "Last" do that, as do "Previous" and "Next" when they take you to the first/last page respectively.

allan

Yup - I (re)found that issue and fixed in while doing some accessibility work on DataTables this week wight he author of the WAI-ARIA spec. With his guidance I've put in a number of accessibility improvements which you can see here: http://datatables.net/dev/accessibility/DataTables_1_10/examples/basic_init/zero_configuration.html .

I'm going to be issuing an rc.1 of DataTables 1.10 soon with these changes in.

Allan