During July 2019, we received several Tech Support calls and feedback from our Beta team alerting us that something had recently changed while using www.Twitter.com with JAWS. Twitter, like Facebook, offers their own shortcut keys to help interact with their pages. For example, on Twitter, you can press the letter J to jump to the next tweet, R to reply to a message, N to create a new tweet, etc.
These commands work on the Twitter page without the need to bypass the same keystrokes that are normally used to perform JAWS Quick Key functions on pages. Recently, however, a change occurred that caused them to stop functioning correctly.
We reached out to Twitter and offered our history of assisting Facebook and other companies with similar matters along with helpful resources they could use. They responded almost immediately, and subsequently had a fix for us to test with them in a few days. Once the markup that allows their shortcut keys to perform functions specific to Twitter was back in place on their page, the fix was rolled out to the public and the shortcut keys now work again as before.
This is an example of the progress made when Access Technology and larger IT companies can identify an issue and work together to solve it in a timely fashion. Want to know more about how great communication and collaboration come together to enhance the overall user experience? Keep checking our blog for future posts where we’ll share how we’re continuing to work with mainstream companies to improve your access.