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Re: Screen Readers as a Development Tool for Web Developers

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From: Leitschuh, Jonathan
Date: Jul 22, 2015 4:07PM

I found one of the most difficult parts of trying to implement
accessibility into an angular grid framework (pull request pending) was
that there was a severe lack of real world application examples that you
could gain inspiration from.

I spent many hours trying to find examples of div based grids that worked
with screen readers, without much luck.
Another major problem was the inconsistency between browsers. One set of
aria roles would work fine in chrome but safari wouldn¹t know how to read
it at all. Meanwhile Firefox would think it was a list not a grid.

There were also many Œgotchas¹ that were totally undocumented.
For example: In chrome as long as the roles for Œrow¹ has some offspring
with a role Œcell¹ it will read it fine. However, in Safari, unless the
dom element with the role Œcell¹ is an immediate dependent of a Œrow¹ the
XCode Accessibility inspector reports that there is a Œgroup¹ between the
row and the cell causing the screen reader to be unable to correctly
interact with the grid.

The grid framework I added accessibility roles to:
http://ui-grid.info/


Pull Request Pending:
https://github.com/angular-ui/ui-grid/pull/3850


-Jonathan

On 7/18/15, 10:26 AM, "Jonathan Avila" < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

>> When I refer to education for developers however, I'm not talking about
>>empathy and understanding of the AT user, I'm referring to the mechanics
>>behind the technology. These are two very different things.
>
>Yes, no disagreement here that developers need to be trained on how
>assistive technology accesses, interacts, and interfaces with content,
>apps, APIs, and specifications. All the points are valid and I agree on
>the education bit as indicated by my bullet on education that these
>things need to be a part of the curriculum and code examples used in
>books, courses, etc.
>
>Jonathan
>
>--
>Jonathan Avila
>Chief Accessibility Officer
>SSB BART Group
> <EMAIL REMOVED>
>
>703-637-8957 (o)
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