WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Google Chrome accessibility developer tools

for

From: Jonathan H
Date: Apr 25, 2014 9:18AM


On 25 April 2014 15:49, < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> Nowhere near enough keyboard activation, doesn't work with
> NaturallySpeaking.

Ah, OK. I didn't want to drag it off-topic, but I was interested to know.

To answer your question, from a newbie's point of view, Chrome's AT
tools seems to be fairly spot on; the results seem to be roughly the
same as WAVE gives, the results are groups by category and severity,
the reasons are explained, and there are hyperlinks to further
explanations, for example:
https://github.com/GoogleChrome/accessibility-developer-tools/wiki/Audit-Rules#-ax_focus_02--elements-with-onclick-handlers-must-be-focusable
Plus, the tools are only ever two clicks away.

So, from this relative newbie's point of view, I've found them the
easiest way to a quick reasonably accurate overview.

To waffle off at a tangent briefly: I, like probably many devs, I came
into the accessibility world via a Google accessibility course, so I
tend to dev totally with Chromevox first as it's just so darn fast,
works straight out of the box, has a wide range of high quality
voices, and has just the shortcuts I need but no more (which is
probably where it downfalls for power users!). Sort of the polar
opposite of Windows Eyes for me. I then fire up Jaws and NVDA and
test Chrome, then Firefox and then IE.

As you can imagine, that's led to me spending a fair amount of time
filing bugs over at the Chrome and NVDA projects!

Incidentally, I've found that people tend to have formed opinions of
Chromevox from early releases - it's a fast-moving project, so it
wouldn't be fair to judge it, and Chrome, on, say, a release from last
August. I realise I'm wandering dangerously into the opinion ground
you wanted to avoid so I'll stop there!