Jaws 16 not reading “alert” role in IE 11

Question

We are facing an issue with Jaws 16 and IE 11. We have some tooltips on the web page where we have assigned role as "alert" so that when JAWS reads it it will will first announce 'alert' and then reads the text. It was working fine for JAWS 15 with IE 11. Now Jaws has released version 16 and we have upgraded to that version due to that it is not announcing the 'alert' when tooltip comes in IE 11. This working perfectly fine with Fire Fox.

Is there any issue with JAWS 16 with IE?

Answer 1

JAWS 16 has recently released the January 2015 update that addressed some issue relating to IE and one of them might resolve your issue:

http://www2.freedomscientific.com/downloads/jaws/jaws-whats-new.asp

In case you already have the January 2015 update then, its worth sending the details of your issues to their technical support:

http://www.freedomscientific.com/Forms/TechSupport

Answer 2

The latest update of Jaws from May 2015 doesn't seem to solve the problem that alerts are read twice in IE11. There is a trick to solve this issue with IE11:

<div id="AriaAlertReceiver" aria-live="polite"></div>

EmsUtils.showAriaAlert = function(msg) {
    var alertDiv = $("#AriaAlertReceiver");
    if (alertDiv[0]){
        // Set the alert text in a div - it already has aria-live=polite
        // This will be actually ignored by IE for now
        alertDiv.html(msg);
        setTimeout(function () {
            // Change the message again after a short time - now IE does detect it
            if (zk.ie >= 11) {
                alertDiv.html(msg + "!");
            }
            setTimeout(function () {
                // Remove the alert after a short time, so it can be used again later
                alertDiv.html("");
            }, 1000);
        }, 100);
    }
}

The trick is to set twice the text of the live region. The first time is ignored by IE11, but the second time the change is detected. aria-live=polite seems to be enough. The example above works in IE11 and Firefox 37 with Jaws 16 from May 2015, on Windows 7. (Chrome doesn't make the announcement, but that's not in my target)