Accessibility on The Session
I spent some time this weekend working on an accessibility issue over on The Session. Someone using VoiceOver on iOS was having a hard time with some multi-step forms.
These forms have been enhanced with some Ajax to add some motion design: instead of refreshing the whole page, the next form is grabbed from the server while the previous one swooshes off the screen.
You can see similar functionality — without the animation — wherever there’s pagination on the site.
The pagination is using Ajax to enhance regular prev/next links — here’s the code.
The multi-step forms are using Ajax to enhance regular form submissions — here’s the code for that.
Both of those are using a wrapper I wrote for XMLHttpRequest.
That wrapper also adds some ARIA attributes. The region of the page that will be updated gets an aria-live value of polite. Then, whenever new content is being injected, the same region gets an aria-busy value of true. Once the update is done, the aria-busy value gets changed back to false.
That all seems to work fine, but I was also giving the same region of the page an aria-atomic value of true. My thinking was that, because the whole region was going to be updated with new content from the server, it was safe to treat it as one self-contained unit. But it looks like this is what was causing the problem, especially when I was also adding and removing class values on the region in order to trigger animations. VoiceOver seemed to be getting a bit confused and overly verbose.
I’ve removed the aria-atomic attribute now. True to its name, I’m guessing it’s better suited to small areas of a document rather than big chunks. (If anyone has a good primer on when to use and when to avoid aria-atomic, I’m all ears).
I was glad I was able to find a fix — hopefully one that doesn’t negatively impact the experience in other screen readers. As is so often the case, the issue was with me trying to be too clever with ARIA, and the solution was to ease up on adding so many ARIA attributes.
It also led to a nice discussion with some of the screen-reader users on The Session.
For me, all of this really highlights the beauty of the web, when everyone is able to contribute to a community like The Session, regardless of what kind of software they may be using. In the tunes section, that’s really helped by the use of ABC notation, as I wrote five years ago:
One of those screen-reader users got in touch with me shortly after joining to ask me to explain what ABC was all about. I pointed them at some explanatory links. Once the format “clicked” with them, they got quite enthused. They pointed out that if the sheet music were only available as an image, it would mean very little to them. But by providing the ABC notation alongside the sheet music, they could read the music note-for-note.
That’s when it struck me that ABC notation is effectively alt text for sheet music!
Then, for those of use who can read sheet music, the text of the ABC notation is automatically turned into an SVG image using the brilliant abcjs. It’s like an enhancement that’s applied, I dunno, what’s the word …progressively.
This was originally posted on my own site.
