There is an NPE in com.sun.java.accessibility.AccessBridge.getAccessibleSelectionFromContext when a selected menu item in an open menu becomes deselected due to a hover over/off of the selected menu item. This is only when Ferret is running. Apparently JAWS and NVDA don't make the same call. The problem is that it is valid for JMenu.AccessibleJMenu.getAccessibleSelection(i) to return null. The code in getAccessibleSelectionFromContext needs to sense for null and return null in this case.