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Well, I still haven’t got involved with Song Bird as I have been far too busy at work.
We are prototyping a new “Configurator” for Jaguar and Land Rover. It uses a lot of AJAX and DHTML on the client, and Java/Websphere on the server.

I am determined to make the site as accessible as possible however. Keyboard controls, mouse control, CSS/XHTML; unobtrusive JavaScript; AJAX can be switched off and the site works just fine.

I’ve also been experimenting with AJAX and Screen Readers, to find a way to ensure that page updates are reported correctly. I’ve been experimenting with using an IFRAME in lieu of XMLHttpRequest objects, to varying degrees of success.

Windows Eyes, JAWS, and FireVox all work well with this technique, but IBM Home Page Reader just will not respond to focus change events; and cannot be forced to switch frames programatically: the user must press a combination of keys to force the reader to switch out of the IFRAME.

I will add more detailed results of these tests here soon – they may prove useful to someone else!