2.1 Understanding Screen Reader Mode

Enabling Screen Reader mode currently does the following, by default:

• Interactive report regions in Report View or Group By View use data tables to convey information. Data tables require a text description that describes what information the table contains to a screen reader user. When running in screen reader mode, these data tables now contain detailed summary text, in the following format:

  • Region - The name of the region defined by the developer.

  • Report - The name of the current Saved Report within the Interactive Report. Default to Primary Default if no saved report is defined.

  • View - The current view of the report (Either Report or Group By).

  • Displayed Rows Start - The starting row of the currently displayed set of rows.

  • Displayed Rows End - The ending row of the currently displayed set of rows.

  • Total Rows - The total number of rows returned by the report.

• Interactive report regions provide the ability to add Aggregates to your report data. One of the available aggregates is to Sum a column's values. When running in screen reader mode, the text Sum: is displayed as a prefix to the summed value. In standard mode only the summed value is displayed. All other aggregates display an aggregate type prefix by default, regardless of mode.

• Item level Help text is provided differently in screen reader mode. In standard mode, a dialog is displayed on your page displaying the Help text for a specific item. Since these dialogs have many problems when used with screen readers, a the classic popup page displays item help text when running in screen reader mode.

• Screen reader mode has greatly improved the process for the user of dealing with raised validation errors. Consider the following example. A form page is submitted and a validation has failed resulting in displayed errors. If the page item has an associated error, then additional markup is added to that page item so that the screen reader informs the user that the item contains an invalid entry, when moving through the form fields. Additionally, the user is informed of the corresponding error message, when moving through the form fields.

  Tip:

  You must be using both a screen reader and browser that supports WAI-ARIA, to benefit from these improvements.

• Interactive report regions have a Fixed Header option that enables developers to fix the headers of the interactive report for visual users. Because this functionality changes the underlying table structure and has a detrimental effect for screen reader users, this option is disabled when running in Screen Reader mode.