ScreenReader Accessibility and Partial Updates in ASP.Net AJAX
Accessibility is an important aspect of software applications. It is ever so important on the web especially to ensure that everyone visiting your site is enabled to access the content. It is also required by a number of government organizations. The current state of UpdatePanel doesn't allow for complete screenreader accessibility with the popular screenrreaders currently available in the market. Window Eyes works correctly and is able to read updated content in a partial postback in simple cases but doesn't work well when triggers are used. Also Jaws doesn't handle re-reading content on partial updates.
To fix this issue I wrote a simple control which provides for this screen-reader accessibility. On any page that will participate in partial rendering, you can employ this control - nothing else needs to be set - just drop this control on your page participating in partial rendering and you are set for screen reader accessiblity - and it will take care of causing the screen reader to re-read content after a partial post-back. I am posting the control herewith - please let me know if you find it useful or any other comments you might have regarding this. I tested with Window Eyes and it works well.
Thanks,
Kashif