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Re: for Chrome devs: intro to accessibility course

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From: Alastair Campbell
Date: Sep 11, 2013 8:31AM

Cameron Cundiff wrote:

> is ChromeVox high enough fidelity
> that it would be useful? Is it so different that it'd be harmful, and in
> what ways?


I wish I knew! I don't have much experience with ChromeVox, so I'm working
from other people's comments, but scenario that worries me is:

A developer creates an interface and tests it on ChromeVox. It seems to
work fine, so they move on.

As Bryan commented on Marco's post:
http://www.marcozehe.de/2013/09/07/why-accessibility-apis-matter/#li-comment-617540
In the new(ish) WAI-ARIA stuff you can code to standards and still create
something unusable to the *people* using it. Even if ChromeVox were 100%
correct and to standard, that would still be a problem because the others
are not, or even just interpret it differently.

When working with developers the process I recommend for "as you go along"
testing by the developer is can you complete the user-tasks:
1. With just the keyboard?
2. When you zoom in (or increase text size, depending on the CSS layout) to
200% and still use/understand it?
3. With a common screen reader (generally NVDA on Windows, VoiceOver on OSX
or iOS).

Obviously the QA/accessibility people have a longer list of things to
check, but I use that ordering with developers to emphasize keyboard-only
and visual aspects, before they get stuck into screen readers.

I am in severe danger of pre-judging Google's course, but given the number
of developers who use Chrome extensively, Google are in a position of great
influence.

-Alastair