[blindlaw] Fillable Government Forms and Screen Readers

Jen Barrow jlynnbarrow at gmail.com
Fri Nov 30 00:52:51 UTC 2018


Hi, All.  I recently started a new job in nonprofit immigration law.  I'm so
thrilled, except that I'm encountering some significant difficulty with
completing the gazillion different government forms involved in seeking
immigration status using JAWS.  I'm hoping that some of you who routinely
interact with unwieldy federal forms can share your tips and tricks with me.
I'm opening the fillable forms in Adobe Pro, and in theory, they should work
fine.  I can tab through the form, check boxes and input text.  However, the
user experience is awful.  For example, JAWS jumps around the form and reads
parts of the form that are not yet visible to sighted people-like #8 somehow
is showing up between #3 and #4 when navigating with JAWS.  In certain
fields, JAWS says "blank" even though I typed something in; sighted people
tell me text is inputted.  JAWS reads a lengthy paragraph of instructions
before each edit field-like it will read: lengthy paragraph first name edit.
These and other wonky behaviors render the more complex forms unusable.  I'm
not particularly tech savvy, so I'm not sure if the difficulty is with JAWS,
Adobe Pro or the construction of the form itself. or I suppose even user
incompetence.  There has to be a better way.  Does anyone have more success
opening fillable forms in another program, like Foxit?  Or perhaps using a
different screen reader?  Or hiring someone to write JAWS scripts?  I would
really appreciate any advice you can offer!

 

Thanks,

Jen 

 




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