Inability to Vote in a poll with a screenreader

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Hello all - I have a few members in my community who are blind and use screen readers. Every 10 weeks we post a voting poll to solicit member selection for our next group discussion. I’ve looked through the threads on accessibility but cannot locate whether there is a solution I can implement for these members who want to vote but are unable to because their assistive technology cannot translate the poll options or allow them to place a vote.

Does anyone have or know of a solution I can implement for this?

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Thanks for your report @Heather13, we will look into this shortly.

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Appreciate the support! Thank you.

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Hey there, I took a look at this using the NVDA screen reader for windows.

I was table to navigate to a poll in a topic, advance through the list of options, and cast my vote with the space button. Further tabbing took me to the “vote” button located at the bottom of the poll, and pressing enter saved my vote.

Do you have any information from your users who use assistive technology on what the hurdles were that they encountered to prevent them from voting?

We’d love to dive further into this but would appreciate a better underatanding.

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@jordan-vidrine - Thank you again for so quickly looking into this! According to the member:

“The screen reading software that enables me to read web pages, does not find any circle next to the book’s name which could be clicked to show my vote. In addition, if the circle is not visible, we are instructed to click on a “Hide results” button. This does not work either.
No “hide results” button is available to me.”

We can reach back out to the member to gain more insight on her experience of course. What questions should I be asking in order to give you the most complete picture to work with?

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I’ll dive into this some more this week and report back with some clarifying questions. Thanks!

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Also, @jordan-vidrine - I heard back from the member regarding the screen reader they are using and it is:

JAWS. The company involved is: Freedom Scientific 800-444-4443

I hope this provides a little more help or direction.

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Just checking in to see if there is more guidance or resolution here :thinking:

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Unfortunately, no progress here, sorry. The main issue is that we don’t spend time doing screen reader testing with JAWS, we only test with NVDA and VoiceOver on the Mac. JAWS requires a licence for users and it’s Windows only, which makes it much harder for our team to use. We’re generally Linux/Mac users and prefer open-source or free software to proprietary. JAWS is the most popular, but their fees are quite high. Even online services that offer rentable accessibility testing (like BrowserStack and AssistivLabs) don’t offer JAWS at the lower pricing brackets.

That said, I’m going to mark this as pr-welcome which means that members of the community are welcome to submit a fix for this issue.

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