Efforts to provide in-browser script access to a11y tree and APIs

There a few interesting initiatives in this area which might well
benefit coga AT

I wonder if it would help Ayelet's coga personalisation work? eg Might
it be possible to create a script that uses heuristics to attempts to
add the new ARIA (coga*) attributes to existing content that does not
have them.

1) Mozilla

https://wicg.github.io/a11yapi/

The API provides bunch of interfaces that are used to express the
semantics of web content in a way that assistive technologies (AT)
knows how to deal with. Also it provides the ability to search and
traverse the content and interact with it. It has a way to extend
existing semantics of the markup, and add new semantics for
inaccessible content like drawings made using the canvas element. Each
piece of semantic content has an associated accessible element the AT
operates on.

2) WAPA is another interesting initiative to address this issue, it
builds on the Mozilla work Joseph highlighted and others (HT Leonie
Watson).

Apparently it can be tried in MS Edge.
https://github.com/cyns/wapa/blob/master/ScriptAccessibility.md
https://discourse.wicg.io/t/script-based-accessibility-for-web-applications/1112

This Script Based Web Accessibility API allows more direct
communication between web applications and platform accessibility
APIs. It includes three pieces

* A way for web authors to provide ARIA name-value pairs (properties)
to platform accessibility APIs from script, without requiring an
element with those aria properties in the Document object.
* A way for web authors to react in script to method calls from
platform accessibility APIs (actions)
* A mechanism for handling accessibility information for virtualized
content, where the DOM contains only a subset of the actual dataset or
document.

Steve Lee
OpenDirective http://opendirective.com

Received on Thursday, 29 October 2015 10:53:56 UTC