title: WAI-ARIA, IE7, and JAWS
body: <p>One of the projects I am currently working on has customer requirements for IE7 and 508 compliance. This customer currently uses JAWS version 9 and is making requests which I am told are impossible without a newer version of JAWS which supports WAI-ARIA. For example:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4269616/accessible-508-compliant-ajax-loading-indicator">Accessible, 508 compliant Ajax Loading Indicator</a></li>
  <li><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4228674/accessible-508-compliant-ajax-pagination">Accessible, 508 compliant Ajax Pagination</a></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Before I come back and tell them that they need to upgrade to a newer version of JAWS (from Freedom Scientific's website, WAI-ARIA is supported starting with version 10), I would like to be armed with as much information as possible to make a convincing argument. First of all, is IE7 capable of conveying ARIA information to JAWS (I've seen claims of ARIA support starting with IE8, but nothing explicitly stating it doesn't work with IE7)? If so, is it only to a limited extent? Supposing the answer to this question is yes and the degree of support is sufficient, are there big differences in support between JAWS versions 10, 11, and 12 which I should know about? Perhaps this will is a good bar to meet: given the requirement for IE7, what is the minimum version of JAWS required to apply ARIA in order to solve the two questions linked above.</p>
  
  <p>I know there are a lot of questions jammed in here, but I believe they worked together as a single question: please give me an overview of the varying degrees of support for WAI-ARIA between IE7 and different versions of JAWS; and to what extent can these solve the customer requests linked above.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks! And even if you can't address all of the elements of this question, I would be grateful for any information you can share.</p>