This document is intended to help prepare an Ember expert for a conversation about accessibility and assumes no prior knowledge.
This prep document is divided into two main sections:
- Screen Reader Basics
- Reference Materials & Additional Resources
The intent of this section is to provide the bare minimum information required to think about this problem space.
How a screen reader works
- Read “Semantics to Screen Readers” by Melanie Richards
- Watch “How A Screen Reader User Accesses The Web” by Léonie Watson
- Be aware that there are pre-existing keyboard shortcuts- https://dequeuniversity.com/screenreaders/
This section has five sub-sections:
- WAI-Aria Spec
- Existing Developer Guides
- The Future of A11y
- The Current State of A11y
- existing leadership in the accessibility space.
These are for your reference, because you will want to be able to reference these.
- W3C Web Accessibility Initiative - https://www.w3.org/WAI/ ←-this is an accessible website
- Standards and Guidelines - https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/
- User Agent Accessibility Guidelines- https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/uaag/
- Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 - https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/
- How to meet WCAG 2.0 - https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/quickref/
- https://www.accessibility-developer-guide.com/
- https://a11yproject.com/about
- https://www.24a11y.com/
- https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/accessibility/
- http://heydonworks.com/practical_aria_examples/
This is an opportunity to get involved in the next thing- we definitely need to pay attention to this, because they are planning on providing guidelines/standards/recommendations to frameworks.
- The Silver Task Force- https://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/task-forces/silver/
This is the current, and seemingly persistent mood of the digital accessibility space. I think these are important to be aware of so we can thoughtfully fix this issue - the foundation of JS frameworks is a mindset that has ignored a11y, leading to a lot of bad feelings in the web community at large.
- “Single Page Apps Routers are Broken” by Rob Deluca - https://medium.com/@robdel12/single-page-apps-routers-are-broken-255daa310cf
- The WebAIM Million- https://webaim.org/projects/million/ ←this is the data we can use
- “Fighting Uphill” by Eric Bailey - https://ericwbailey.design/writing/2019-03-05-fighting-uphill.html
- “The Web We Broke” by Ethan Marcotte https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/the-web-we-broke/
- “Accessibility is not a React Problem” - https://www.netlify.com/blog/2019/02/25/accessibility-is-not-a-react-problem/
- “Building Better Accessibility Primitives” by Rob Dodson https://robdodson.me/building-better-accessibility-primitives/
These are the people of whose work I recommend being minimally aware:
- Léonie Watson - https://tink.uk/
- Steve Faulkner- https://twitter.com/stevefaulkner
- Jamie Teh - Mozilla/Firefox (formerly NVDA)
- Melanie Richards, Microsoft
- Rob Dodson, Google (https://robdodson.me/)
- Marcie Sutton, A11y speaker, React - https://marcysutton.com/
- Derek Featherstone, prominent speaker on Inclusive Design - https://aneventapart.com/speakers/derek-featherstone