Advancing Accessibility in Sakai: JAWS and drag-and-drop
What Sakai developers learned from JAWS and NVDA event handling, and how that changes accessibility testing.
Advancing Accessibility in Sakai: JAWS and drag-and-drop
Automated checks do not replace testing with assistive technology. A recent TPGi article, “Event handling in JAWS and NVDA”, explains how screen readers interact with web content and why JavaScript event handling can behave differently than developers expect.
The article covers virtual cursor mode, forms mode, and the browser events each mode can trigger. A button press in virtual cursor mode, for example, may fire mouse events. That matters when developers assume a keyboard interaction will only produce keyboard events.
Sakai developers use that guidance when they work on ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications), keyboard navigation, focus management, and screen reader feedback. JAWS testing helps catch issues that automated checks often miss, especially when event handlers need to communicate a state change to assistive technology.
Recent Gradebook updates show the work in practice. The changes adjust event handling, ARIA attributes, and focus behavior so JAWS can announce interactions correctly. That is the difference between code that passes a checklist and a workflow that a screen reader user can complete.
The same distinction matters when institutions buy assessment systems. The accessible assessment procurement guide turns keyboard and assistive-technology behavior into evidence requests and acceptance tests.
