Thursday October 05, 2006

Making Rich Web Applications accessible: WAI-ARIA

Web applications have gotten more rich, and more complex, and more interactive, over the years - and with these changes making them accessible has become more and more difficult. Last week the the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative issued a press release and a Call for Review of the solution: the WAI-ARIA Roadmap, the WAI's Accessible Rich Internet Application specification suite.

WAI-ARIA takes the route that Sun took with Java in 1997, Sun and the open souce GNOME (and now KDE) began in 2000, that Apple took in Mac OS X, and that Microsoft is taking in Vista: supporting assistive technologies via a formal accessibility contract between the (web) application and the assistive technology. The only difference is that with WAI-ARIA, it is the job of the Web client to expose the WAI-ARIA information and application events to the AT via the accessibility frameworks on the operating system (UNIX, Macintosh, Windows) in question. This is done in WAI-ARIA by tagging the user interface elements of a rich web application with the appropriate RDF role (so the screen reader call tell the blind user that this thing is a button or a menu item), with the appropriate RDF States (so the screen reader can tell the blind user that this checkbox is unchecked, what that checkbox is checked), and then having those web applications fire the appropriate events (so that the screen reader knows what is focused and can speak it, and the screen magnifier know what is focused so it can pan the magnified region of the screen to encompass it).

And one of the great things about WAI-ARIA and the open source community, is that folks have already implemented support for this in Firefox (and further working with the Mozilla Foundation Windows AT products like JAWS and WindowEyes and ZoomText are making accessible Firefox's exposure of the WAI-ARIA and thereby rich web applications to people with disabilities; with UNIX support coming in Firefox 3.0). So, if you are interested in developing rich Web applications, you now have the tools to make them accessible to people with disabilities. [yes, these specifications aren't yet final, but the drafts are implemented - and while they may change some, it's far better to use them as they are now to start making your rich web app accessible than to wait and offer nothing to folks with disabilities]. (2006-10-05 22:31:04.0) Permalink