On our website, http://www.discovertechnologies.com, we have a Skip to Content link that upon pressing enter on it sends the JAWS user to the main content and immediately begins to read whatever is in the div marked by id=âmainâ; like it should. However, for some reason this only works successfully in Chrome and Firefox but not in Internet Explorer.
In IE11 the screen shifts down to “read” the main content, but JAWS will not read what is in the div. Iâve researched the web to find a solution but havenât been able to, which is why I reach out to you. For what it’s worth our website is WordPress based. Thanks!
As pointed out in this article on skip links, in-page links can have different behavior across browsers. What’s happening in IE is that IE is only scrolling the page – it’s not actually moving focus (you can verify this by checking document.activeElement in the console) – and since there’s no focus change, JAWS remains silent.
A simple workaround is to use javascript to set focus:
The
href="javascript:void(0)"here is to suppress navigation – otherwise IE will essentially re-navigate to the page, potentially interfering with focus.