Community Meeting (May 16, 2018): Firefox accessibility Inspector

Description

Presenter: Yura Zenevich

Introducing the Accessibility Inspector

Accessibility Object Model Explainer

Video Recording

Notes

• Accessibility Inspector

  • due out in FF 61 ( should be mid July 2018)

    • use from the Dev Tools, but it will be disabled by default

  • intended for those who already know about a11y, not meant to educate about a11y

  • it will display the a11y tree

    • the a11y tree is how a browser represents accessible information

    • it corresponds to the level or aria support by Firefox

    • similar to DOM tree

  • it will help you to determine if things that you have presented to the user matches the semantic structure of the document

    • e.g. is the visual presentation inline with what will be presented to a screen reader

  • Future plans

    • potentially provide educational information, for example tooltip to describe the role of an item

      • links to MDN

    • show how the name of the element was determined, similar to how CSS shows how rules are overridden

    • will improve highlighting of elements in the DOM to include info such as role and name, and other things to hep with diagnostics of a11y issues.

    • add more properties for relations between accessible objects

• AOM

  • https://github.com/WICG/aom/blob/gh-pages/explainer.md

    • still in development

  • one of the primary reasons is for canvas accessibility. 

    • will allow developers to build virtual accessibility trees.

  • another reason is to help with relations that need an id reference

    • for example aria-describedby, so that you don't need to actually provide an id to link them.

  • save from modifying the DOM to make changes to the a11y tree

  • also provides better accessibility for web components because the browser will be able to emit a11y events.