Hi Evolve team!
We’re seeing some consistent issues when testing courses with NVDA screen reader.
All dialog contents announced twice by the screen reader.
Closing a dialog using screen reader often takes user to the top of the page.
User is taken out of a slides component after the second slide.
Screen reader reading text again from some seemingly random point in the text it has already read, when it should have moved on. This happens a lot in question and answer activities.
Is this a bug with NVDA? Or is something in our build process causing this?
Hi there, these sound like historical issues that we used to experience with NVDA. Last time I tested issues like this weren’t really happening. Couple of questions:
-Are you running the latest version of NVDA?
-Do you test with other screenreaders, eg JAWS or VoiceOver? Have you found similar issues?
Evolve was audited by Online ADA recently and they tested with NVDA but did not report these kinds of issues.
cheers-Sam
Hi Sam!
We don’t have JAWS. We do have VoiceOver, though, and when we test on that we’re not seeing the same issues. I’ll try reinstalling NVDA to see what that does.
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Hiya,
I can confirm that closing a dialog using screen reader often takes user to the top of the page when using NVDA.
This is something that used to happen, then was fixed and I wonder what has changed?
While we also test using JAWS and Narrator (which are good now, but unfortunately does not read out the ARIA labels 
), it would be great if NVDA would stop playing up, as it reads the ARIA labels.
Thanks.
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NVDA can be a bit unreliable (all the screenreaders can be to some degree). There’s nothing we have changed in Evolve that would trigger that regression. When I get a chance I will do a test with NVDA to see how it’s behaving. Thanks both!
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Could you be more specific about which component this applies to? There are quite a few that have slide/carousel functionality
It depends on which dialog you’re referring to here but Evolve is set up to send ‘focus’ back to an appropriate button beneath the dialog when it is closed.
For example, if it’s a transcript dialog, focus will be sent to the transcript button that triggered the dialog. For a feedback dialog, it returns focus to either the ‘reset’ button or the ‘show answer’ button.
This is definitely working: if you navigate using the keyboard, you can see the focus outline showing around the revelant button.
Why NVDA isn’t picking that up I have no idea but it does seem to be a common problem with NVDA.
Unfortunately NVDA currently has > 2,100 open issues on their Github repository so even trying to find if this a known issue is pretty challenging…
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@Matt_Leathes it’s on Narrative components.
I have no idea why that would be happening then, there’s nothing in the Narrative that tells the focus to shift. As you navigate through the slides, Evolve updates an ARIA ‘live region’ with the slide contents, so that its not necessary for the screenreader user to navigate back to slide contents to have them read out.
The Narrative component was made accessible fairly recently (Jan this year) so has been heavily tested by @Sam_Cook_Evolve_LQA as well as having been audited by Online ADA.
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