Accessibility and ARIA
(two in a row...)
Charles McCathieNevile
Standards, Opera
chaals@opera.com
The Best Internet Experience
On Any Device, Anywhere
Implementing accessibility
- What we had done
- How screenreaders broke
- How to fix them...
- Where are we up to now?
- What else is important...?
Old news...
- Keyboard control, for any command
- Mouse gestures, Voice input and output
- Full page Zoom
- User CSS modes
- improve access with Style
- Configure almost everything
Building on a base
Accessibility remains important
- Maintain keyboard control of new technology
- Zoom more complex content
- Site specific preferences
- Spreading Voice (first to Macintosh...)
And screen readers
Screen Readers - History
- Opera 6 - Screen Reader compatible
- well, at least on Windows...
Opera needed to be easily portable
- "Quick" layer, broke system APIs
- Difficult to cover all platforms
Major need was portability. Accessibility lost :(
Accessible `" Portable?
- In theory, they are very close...
- ... but in accessibility, no :(
- Different APIs for each platform
- Accessibility still rare in Grads
- Standards would have helped here
Work on unifying access APIs is vital!
Screen Readers Back!
- Opera 9.5 has experimental support
- Have been working for a while
- Build or Buy accessibility competence?
- Steady progress - Mac and Windows
- Build or Buy the competence?
Try a weekly: my.opera.com/desktopteam
(WARNING check for issues, and Back Up!)
Portability Ô! Standards
- Standard Accessibility APIs are important
- Each platform has its own...
- ...that is only uses sometimes
- Windows the worst - MSAA almost useless alone
- Mac among best, with VoiceOver as free commodity
Standards is not about inventing technology
- it is about making it work better
Where are we?
- We have built in link/header/etc navigation
- Already support working without images
- Building accessibility into the product design
- Mac more or less usable - but not brilliant yet
- More work needed in many areas to be the best
Some small problems hide big progress...
...But there are also real issues to deal with.
Some challenges
- Screen Reader companies are small and busy (AL++)
- Widgets and Web applications, not just documents
- Extensive functionality - don't overwhelm!
- Getting skilled and experienced developers...
(We are hiring an accessibility position...)
- Opera ships on Windows (95 - Vista), OSX, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, BREW, J2ME, EZX, µITRON, Symbian40/60/80/90, UIQ, ...
Some wins...
- The Cross Platform Architecture scales
- SVG (somewhat acceSsible Vector Graphics)
- Publicly available now for test/comment
- Energy from our volunteer community
- Will be developed beyond Kestrel into future
So, while that adventure continues...
The ARIA at the Opera
(Accessible Rich Internet Applications)
- Based on Javascript access work (1990s)
- Accessibility for Web 2.0
- Getting Implemented...
- ...and redefined now??
The Idea...
- Web 2.0 is applications - Javascript
- With Web UI elements, weak accessibility
- And forget the alleged semantics
- Label things for what they do
- If it's labelled "checkbox" then it IS...
At least to the platform's APIs
Teach old screen readers "new" tricks
Using it in a page
(This is faked - the spec is in flux)
Label it a checkbox, standardise on/off,
the browser tells the sreen reader 'it's a checkbox'
Another example
(This is faked - the spec is in flux)
The Spec..
- ARIA was designed for XML
- can work in XHTML, SVG, XHTML2, ...
- But not in HTML5 :(
(no namespaces in HTML5)
- So it's being re-written to work there too
More social than technical engineering required...
To Take Home
- Open standards used properly help
- Adaptability Ò! Good Results
- Label content (tagging is a start)
- Diversity is increasing
- But there is only One Web
Supporting new standards does matter
Thank You
There are no foolish questions
just people too foolish to question
chaals@opera.com