JAWS screen reader adding tabIndex of -1 to anchors with images

Question

I have three anchor tags, one with text inside and two with images with valid alt text. The anchor tag with text inside works fine with JAWS and is read properly. However, for some reason, with the anchors with the image inside, a tabIndex of -1 is being applied, which means they are being skipped over.
This is being tested in IE 9. Is there any reason why this should be occurring? Is there a way to prevent it?

Answer 1

JAWS automatically add tabindex="-1" to anchor tags which have href="javascript:void(0)". I used href="#" to solve the same problem as yours.