Issue
When an alert dialog or modal dialog is opened, such as a "Save Changes" or "Discard Changes" confirmation dialog, JAWS announces the dialog title, description, and interactive controls multiple times. This excessive verbosity can make it difficult for screen reader users to understand the purpose of the dialog and determine the available actions.
Users may hear the dialog title and message repeated several times before focus reaches the action buttons. In some cases, the buttons themselves are also announced multiple times, creating a confusing and disruptive experience. This issue is solely found in the JAWS screen reader and has been reproduced outside of Pega, including in WCAG examples.
What are the exact steps you would take to reproduce the problem?
JAWS Professional 2025 / Chromium Browser
- Navigate to a page containing an alert dialog or modal dialog.
- Activate a control that opens the dialog (for example, a button that triggers a dirty-check dialog asking whether changes should be saved or discarded).
- Listen to the announcement made by JAWS when the dialog opens.
No additional interaction is required to reproduce the issue.
What do you expect to happen?
When the dialog opens, JAWS should announce:
- The dialog title once.
- The dialog description or message once.
- The control that receives focus once.
The announcement should be concise and provide users with the information necessary to understand the context of the dialog without unnecessary repetition.
What actually does happen?
JAWS announces the dialog container, title, description, and focused controls multiple times when the dialog opens.
For example, users may hear:
- The dialog title repeated several times.
- The dialog message announced more than once.
- Action buttons such as Save, Discard, or Cancel repeated multiple times.
This behavior increases verbosity, can interrupt the user's workflow, and may make it difficult to determine when the announcement has completed.
If you are having problems with a third-party application, what is the name, software version, and build number of this application?
Not available publicly.
The issue can be reproduced using publicly available ARIA alert dialog examples.
If a demonstration version of this third-party software is available, what is the URL where the application can be downloaded?
N/A
If you are having trouble with a web page, what is the URL of that web site?
W3C ARIA Authoring Practices Alert Dialog Example
What additional comments can you provide?
The issue has been observed using alert dialogs that follow the ARIA Authoring Practices Guide (APG) implementation and can be reproduced outside of proprietary applications.
The dialog correctly exposes ARIA semantics, including the use of role="alertdialog" along with accessible names and descriptions. However, JAWS appears to announce portions of the dialog content multiple times when focus moves into the dialog.
It would be helpful to understand whether this behavior is expected for alert dialogs, whether it is specific to certain browser and screen reader combinations, or whether there are recommended ARIA authoring patterns that can reduce the duplicate announcements.
=> Special Thanks to Jesse Monks for his in-depth analysis on this issue.