I'm not sure if I have the technical knowledge to present this to The Times. Do you object if I forward part of your remarks that describe the problem?

Gene
-----Original Message----- From: Greg Williams
Sent: Friday, August 07, 2020 2:02 PM
To: nvda@nvda.groups.io
Subject: Re: [nvda] A possible bug

It is an issue with the HTML. For whatever reason, they coded the links
under the opinion section differently than the rest of the links. They
used accessibility badly which made it worse than if they had done
nothing. In the opinion section, the put an aria-label on the <a> tag
for the link; this tells assistive technology to  ignore any other text
in the link. The h2 tag is wrapped inside the <a> tag which means that
it also gets ignored by the assitive technology.

I imagine that the reason the old version of NVDA detected the headings
is that it is old enough that it did not handle aria-labels and so just
ignored them and picked up the nested content including the h2. I will
stop here and refrain from giving my opinion on the coding practices in
the webpage.

Greg


On 8/6/2020 9:46 PM, Gene wrote:

I haven't asked The Times.  I thought it was a problem with NVDA since mhy old version recognizes them as headings.  I haven't used JAWS to any extent for years but it might be useful for someone using a current JAWS to see if these links are seen as headings.

Gene
-----Original Message----- From: Gene
Sent: Thursday, August 06, 2020 8:42 PM
To: nvda@nvda.groups.io
Subject: Re: [nvda] A possible bug

When I use a very old version of NVDA, they are reported as headings when I
move from heading to heading with report headings turned on.  I don't know
what the last version was that this occurs.  I can also move to the articles
when using filter by headings in the elements list of the old version.

I don't know how old a version of NVDA needs to be used.  I use Windows 7
and I still use 13.x much of the time because it does almost everything I
want.  I play around with new versions at times.

All other articles on the page are reported as headings in the new NVDA. So
why aren't these and how often, on other pages, may material be being
missed?

Evidently, there is something different about these headings but what?

Gene
-----Original Message----- From: Quentin Christensen
Sent: Thursday, August 06, 2020 8:27 PM
To: nvda@nvda.groups.io
Subject: Re: [nvda] A possible bug


Hi Gene,

It looks like those articles aren't marked up as headings.  If you go to the
Opinion heading, you can then press TAB or K to go to the links for the
pieces, but they aren't reported as headings.  Looking in the elements list,
I can find them in the links but not headings.

Pages like the New York Times are quite complex and it's likely something
has been missed somewhere along the line.  What did the NYT people have to
say?

Quentin.


On Fri, Aug 7, 2020 at 8:24 AM Gene <gsasner@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm using the latest beta, I haven't switched to the production version.

This appears to be a bug and it may result in information being missed. On
The New York Times home page, using Firefox or Brave, I haven't yet tested
with Chrome, but Brave is Chrome-based, when you get to the opinion part of
the page, the articles in that section aren't seen as headings. All other
articles are seen as headings and using a very old NVDA, the articles in the
opinion section are seen as headings.  This is using Windows 7.

I just tested with NVDA 2019.2.21 and the same thing happens so this likely
bug has been around for some time.

I also just tested with Chrome and the same thing occurs.  All articles in
the opinion section are skipped and the screen-reader moves directly to the
editor's picks heading.  It needs to be determined what is causing this
problem and that may help determine its seriousness.

Gene