Re: Voiceover detection in JavaScript

"It might be easy, but it's unlikely to be a good idea for web
sites/apps. That line of thinking leads to user-agent specific apps
and sites, rather than making things accessible to the widest
audience."

Actually that's incorrect. Limiting the resources that are available to 
developers to solve basic and simple accessibility issues by requiring full 
UI changes makes it more likely that such accessibility issues will be 
ignored.

Here are three simple examples of this.

Scrollable Divs are present all over the web, however they are extremely 
difficult to use with Voiceover running. The simplest solution for this is 
to provide two buttons, Scroll Up and Scroll Down, so that Voiceover users 
can simply tap them to scroll the content. However this is highly 
undesirable for visual UI designers and will never be included.

Carousels with dynamically rotating content are also present everywhere, but 
can be very confusing for Voiceover users, when the content keeps changing 
as you try to read it.

Videos that play automatically when a page loads are another issue, which is 
fine for sighted users, but is very difficult for Voiceover users who can't 
hear Voiceover reliably when trying to read the content of the page to find 
the player controls when the video keeps playing.

So here is a simple solution

Add an event, such as 'voiceoverStateChanged' to Safari, which when 
triggered, updates a global Boolean in the browser, such as 
window.isVoiceoverRunning. When True, Voiceover is running, and when False, 
it's not.
As a state change event, this can be tapped into in the same way that touch 
events are, so that this detection can be automatic.

Now, if this were the case.

Scrollable Divs could have navigation buttons dynamically added when 
Voiceover is running, and removed when it is not.

Carousels can be automatically stopped when Voiceover is running, or 
continue when it is not.

Automatically playing videos can be stopped onLoad when Voiceover is 
running, or play when it is not.

There are an infinite number of ways where this would be beneficial for 
accessibility, and none that I can see where this would cause negative 
issues to occur.



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Alastair Campbell" <alastc@gmail.com>
To: "Bryan Garaventa" <bryan.garaventa@whatsock.com>
Cc: "WAI Interest Group" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Sent: Tuesday, April 02, 2013 1:54 AM
Subject: Re: Voiceover detection in JavaScript


> Bryan Garaventa wrote:
>> That's quite a deficiency, since it should be fairly easy to implement 
>> the
>> checker in Safari by querying the objects within the native iOS platform, 
>> in
>> the same way that Windows browsers do for COM objects.
>
> It might be easy, but it's unlikely to be a good idea for web
> sites/apps. That line of thinking leads to user-agent specific apps
> and sites, rather than making things accessible to the widest
> audience.
>
> If you share what it is you're trying to achieve, perhaps there is a
> web-friendly way of doing that?
>
> -Alastair
>

Received on Tuesday, 2 April 2013 17:35:11 UTC