Google Health with WAI-ARIA support!

T.V. Raman reports the latest Google ARIA addition goes to Google Health. See also the related article in eWeek. It makes good business sense, and is a good move for many reasons.

Google's approach, of sending ARIA over the wire only when necessary, intrigues me, but I think there must be a better way of automating the decision. Are users comfortable setting "enable screenreader support" as a preference? It seems many people are generally concerned about giving away too much information about themselves...

T.V. lists the key-bindings for using this Web 2.0 application and they look like they gel with the DHTML Style Guide. Nice work Google.

The W3C draft specification: WAI-ARIA continues its emergence as the solution for providing Web2.0 experiences for everyone.

GWT ARIA News

Alex Rudnick from the Google Web Toolkit Team has recently posted on the topic of ARIA and GWT 1.5. Specifically he states

To make applications built with GWT more easily accessible, we've added accessibility support to the GWT library by baking ARIA roles and states into our widgets

Great stuff. Not everything in the youthful ARIA ecosystem of browsers, desktop, and assistive technology is fully working; but we'll get there if we all work together.

Thanks for reading.

Google Chromer to join ARIA browser group

Jonas Klink from Google will join the WAI-ARIA browser harmonization effort! This small and lean group, spearheaded by Aaron Leventhal currently meets weekly to discuss the details of how user agents should expose WAI-ARIA semantics and events to the desktop platform accessibility layer. We have representation from Firefox, Safari/WebKit, Chrome/WebKit, IE, and Opera; as well as some representation from JavaScript toolkit ARIA development (me).

The current work is focused on contributions to the ARIA User Agent Implementors Guide created by Aaron. This document captures practical implementation details based on the experiences of the Firefox accessibility developers in pioneering browser ARIA support.

Thanks for reading.

Google's Browser?

It seems Google has an open source browser project.

I believe this must be true because a comic strip on the web told me so. While I was reading this comic I wasn't sure what amazed me more, the interesting things I was learning about the technical design of Chrome (the Browser), or the fact that I was enjoying learning about the technical design of Chrome from comic characters.

Is Chrome accessible? Although there was a lot of information about V8, the JavaScript VM, the comic didn't tell me if it had WAI-ARIA support for JavaScript+DOM+CSS based web applications. I was really hoping to see a T.V. Raman, or Charles Chen comic character.

Seriously though, it sounds like the rendering is to be done by Webkit, so perhaps too, the exposure of ARIA semantics in the DOM to desktop Accessibility API will eventually come from Webkit. Of course Firefox has pioneered this stuff, but Aaron is helping the other browsers as much as he can. Today, ARIA is a crucial piece of pushing the web as an application platform.

Thanks for reading.