Accessibility 2.0 at Web Directions North

What may be accessible to the screen reader user, may not be accessible to the mobile user. Or how about the corporate user that cannot access your JavaScript because of firewall restrictions? These are all considerations that should be accounted for when building an accessible website. Speaking of JavaScript…

3. The JavaScript screen reader myth

It’s a fairly common misunderstanding that screen readers do not support JavaScript. I will admit it, previous to this workshop, I also fell suspect to this common myth. Well ok, technically screen readers do not support JavaScript, but the browsers they run on top of do. Screen readers are not used exclusively for the web – they’re used for the complete computing experience – so it makes sense that JavaScript support is not built directly into the screen reader. Why re-invent the wheel, when the underlying browser already supports JavaScript?

4. The off-screen model and Ajax

As a web page renders, screen readers capture the data and build an off-screen model (OSM). Essentially this is a virtual buffer of all the textual content built into a page’s markup. When the screen reader user requests information, it is read aloud from the OSM instead of the rendered display. One problem Derek mentioned about the OSM is that if new off-page content is fetched dynamically without a page reload – say via Ajax – often times the screen reader will fail to update the OSM buffer. The user can manually initiate an update to the OSM, but the problem lies in notifying the user that a change has taken place. So what can we do? Well, there’s this JavaScript solution, but it relies on a hack to the tabIndex property, doesn’t work in Safari and doesn’t guarantee to be future proof. Problems aside, I think it’s probably the best solution for this problem currently. I imagine with all the Ajax use on the web nowadays, screen reader manufacturers are probably working hard to find a solution to this pesky problem.

5. Opera, the most accessible browser

I’ve always been fond of the Opera browser. It’s already arguably the most standards compliant web browser on the desktop web, but accessibility too? Yes that’s right, Opera has embraced accessibility so much that it has built in specific accessibility features into the core of their desktop browser. Opera Voice is a feature that can function as a screen reader – reading content from the page – or voice recognition software – allowing the user to interact with the browser via voice commands (sadly this is not available in the Mac version). There is also text zooming, user stylesheet support and a great accesskey implementation all built into Opera.

All in all this was a great experience and I hope to have similar opportunities in the future. And Web Directions North was great. I hope the trend continues next year with another Web Directions North conference in the beautiful city of Vancouver, BC.