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Re: Accessible 'Live chat' solution to integrate on a website

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From: Bryan Garaventa
Date: Sep 13, 2017 11:55AM

Hi,
Actually making live chat work accessibly on the web is incredibly easy and it has always confused me why this is so widely misunderstood.

There are only a couple main issues that complicate this, 1 is keyboard accessibility, which is simple by managing focus to and from the message field, and the second is conveying the incoming messages and other status messages that are visually displayed to screen reader users.

Getting incoming messages to be announced is simple using ARIA. Here is one JavaScript module that does exactly this:
https://github.com/accdc/aria-announce

Back in 2013, I created a test page to test support for this across desktop and mobile at
http://whatsock.com/tsg/Coding%20Arena/Web%20Chat%20and%20Dynamic%20Message%20Announcement/Web%20Chat%20(Static)/demo.htm

Optionally a small sound can be added to convey when incoming messages arrive to cover cases when ARIA is not supported or if people are looking at something else, but that is relatively simple to add.



Bryan Garaventa
Accessibility Fellow
Level Access, Inc.
<EMAIL REMOVED>
415.624.2709 (o)
www.LevelAccess.com