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Re: Adobe Edge Accessibility?

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From: Léonie Watson
Date: Nov 5, 2015 2:08AM

> From: WebAIM-Forum On Behalf Of Jordan Wilson
> Sent: 05 November 2015 04:16
> We've been tasked with creating an HTML5 animation and one of our
> animators attempted to build it using Adobe Edge. It looks good, but
> unfortunately we're finding that the output of Edge is a horribly inaccessible
> mess of dynamically rendered DIVs. Keyboard control seems impossible.
>
> I've scoured the web for help and found nothing. There are folks who seem
> to think the code is automatically accessible because its native HTML, but no
> who actually tested the results with AT.

The chances are that the problem is with Edge, rather than with your code.

Edge does not support MSAA, the Windows accessibility API that most ATs relied on in Internet Explorer. It supports UIAutomation (UIA), but as I understand it most ATs do not yet play well with this accessibility API.

In addition, Edge does not permit third party access to the DOM. Traditionally ATs have circumvented the accessibility APIs by directly accessing the DOM when necessary. In Edge this is no longer possible.

Microsoft has committed to improving UIA. You can track features that have been implemented and those on the roadmap using MS' platform status feature [1].

To date Narrator probably has the most capability in Edge. NVDA has also introduced support for Edge, but it is constrained by the limitations of UIA. Jaws and Window Eyes do not support Edge at all, and to the best of my knowledge none of the magnifier and/or speech/magnifier combo ATs support it either. I suspect the same is true for speech recognition tools, but can't say for certain.

Léonie.
[1] https://dev.windows.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/


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Senior accessibility engineer @LeonieWatson @PacielloGroup