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

Owned by Justin Obara
Last updated: May 17, 2018
1 min read

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.