508 Accessibility and Next/Prev buttons

jrichview

I'm not an expert in accessibility, so I'm interested to hear what others' experience with this is.

Several of our clients (gov. agencies) require 508 compliance aka accessibility for screen readers such as Jaws. We used DataTables for a project and that client is raising an issue about the next/prev buttons being unclear.

It sounds to me like the issue is based on the fact that the buttons never actually get disabled (i.e. disabled attribute set to "disabled" in html) which means you can tab to a disabled paging button. This confuses the user because the screen reader software does not indicate that it is a disabled button.

I have tried (ver 1.9) hooking the "page" and "filter" events and running the following code:

        $("div.dataTables_paginate a").each(function() { 
            $(this).removeAttr("disabled");       //.prop("disabled", false);
        });
        $("div.dataTables_paginate a.ui-state-disabled").each(function() { 
            $(this).prop("disabled", true);
        });

But for whatever reason (timing?), disabled buttons that get re-enabled no longer act as tab stops. As you can see I have tried both the above methods to re-enable.

I've looked at 1.10 and it looks like those buttons are still not actually disabled. Does anyone else here have issues with compliance related to these buttons?