How to get Jaws to read aria-describedby attribute

Question

The problem is as mentioned in the title and here is what I have as my HTML code.

<li> <a id="blog-setup" href="https://illinois.edu/toolbox/0.portlet?componentId=13&amp;desktopId=1" aria-describedby="readme">setup</a> </li>
<div id="readme">HELLO WORLD</div>

What happens is Jaws states the following: "Link setup...press the Jaws key, alt key, and R to read the aria-describedby". What I expect would be for Jaws to say "Link setup Hello World".

Answer 1

The behavior is what is intended (I'm not saying it is what it should be), JAWS has aria-describedby support since version 12 and it just alerts the user that it exists and reads the shortcut. If you have JAWS 12 or later, you can find the message in .smf files (JAWS shared settings folder) in [HTML Attribute Behavior Table] section, in my Classic.smf there is a line

    describedby=1|NormalVoice:Use JawsKey+Alt+R to read descriptive text||

Answer 2

It may actually relate to the verbosity setting you are using in JAWS. JAWS allows users to choose the longest, long desc, title, link text etc by user choice on initial set up.

Also, check which version of JAWS you are testing with, the newest version is JAWS 13.0.

Answer 3

In my case, when I focus the item with the descriptive text, and press (INS + ALT + R), JAWS simply says "Alt R" and nothing else. Any idea why is this happening?