ScreenReader Accessibility and Partial Updates in ASP.Net AJAX

Accessibility is an important aspect of software applications. It is ever so important on the web especially to ensure that everyone visiting your site is enabled to access the content. It is also required by a number of government organizations. The current state of UpdatePanel doesn't allow for complete screenreader accessibility with the popular screenrreaders currently available in the market. Window Eyes works correctly and is able to read updated content in a partial postback in simple cases but doesn't work well when triggers are used. Also Jaws doesn't handle re-reading content on partial updates.

To fix this issue I wrote a simple control which provides for this screen-reader accessibility. On any page that will participate in partial rendering, you can employ this control - nothing else needs to be set - just drop this control on your page participating in partial rendering and you are set for screen reader accessiblity - and it will take care of causing the screen reader to re-read content after a partial post-back. I am posting the control herewith - please let me know if you find it useful or any other comments you might have regarding this. I tested with Window Eyes and it works well.

Thanks,

Kashif 

ReaderAccessibility.zip

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 03, 2007
  I'm sorry, I would like to implement your control, but I don't know exactly how I have to drop it on my page :s What do I have to do?  Do I have to import de .dll as a reference?  Which methods do I have to use? I can't see the structure of it...

• Anonymous
  May 03, 2007
  I found a way to add the control, but I have another problem :s After compilation, I get "Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its dependencies."

• Anonymous
  July 25, 2007
  I have now installed ASP.NET Ajax 1.0.I am facing the same problem for one of my Ajax Based solution.Can anyone help.

• Anonymous
  July 25, 2007
  Gaurav, can you please provide details on the problem you are facing?

• Anonymous
  November 02, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  November 04, 2007
  Kashif,   Under Asp.Net 2.0 and Studio 2005, I tried doing an @Register to your DLL and found that it wanted what appeared to be references to 1.1 Dlls.  Might your Dll need to be recompiled for 2.0?   Next, I tried using your C# source under a Studio 2005 AJAX-enabled website.  The good news was it compiled the AccessibleReader.cs source correctly.  However, it threw IE errors, not recognizing the Sys namespace.  I believe I need to learn AJAX better.  To fix the broken Sys reference, please recommend your best learning resource... Dave