ARIA and Accessibility Hackathon

Goal: Work on ARIA and accessibility implementations of jQuery UI; get in touch with the ARIA community, help out elsewhere

July 11-12, 2011, plus optional three days (13-15)

Location: Inclusive Design Research Centre, 205 Richmond St W, 2nd floor, OCAD University, Toronto, Canada (map)

irc: #aria-hackathon on irc.freenode.net

Schedule

Gather at OCAD University at 9am, start with talks at 10am.

Participants

feel free to add your name whether you'll be in Toronto or just attend in irc (or otherwise virtually)

1. Richard D. Worth, jQuery UI ( twitter: @rworth , irc: rworth , github: rdworth )
2. Scott González, jQuery UI ( twitter: @scott_gonzalez , irc: scott_gonzalez , github: scottgonzalez )
3. Jörn Zaefferer, jQuery UI ( twitter: @bassistance , irc: jzaefferer , github: jzaefferer ) 
4. Colin Clark, OCAD ( twitter: @colinbdclark , irc: colinclark , github: colinbdclark ) 
5. Hans Hillen, TPG,  (twitter: @hanshillen, irc: hhillen, github: hanshillen)
6. Justin Obara, OCAD (irc: Justin_o, github: jobara )
7. Dan Heberden, jQuery UI ( twitter: @danheberden, irc/github: danheberden ) 
8. Mat Marquis, Filament Group ( twitter: @wilto, github: wilto ) 
9. Darcy Clarke, jQuery Front End (twitter: @darcy_clarke, irc: darcyclarke, github: darcyclarke)
10. Wes Bos, DealPage.me (twitter: @wesbos, irc: wesbos, github: wesbos)
11. Aaron Leventhal, Research In Motion, formerly Firefox a11y lead (twitter: @aaronlev, irc aaronlev)
12. David Bolter (~1 day), Mozilla Accessibility (twitter: @davidbolter, irc: davidb)
13. George Zamfir, a11y consultant, currently at Scotiabank (twitter: @georgezamfir) 
14. Joseph Scheuhammer, OCAD (irc: clown, identi.ca: @clown, twitter: @xlown)
15. Ates Goral, Alcatel-Lucent (twitter: @atesgoral, irc: atesgoral, github: atesgoral) 
16. Michelle D'Souza, OCAD (irc: michelled, github: michelled)
17. Antranig Basman, Fluid Project, GPII (irc: Bosmon, Bosmon1-7, github: amb26, twitter: @amb26ponder) 
18. Harris Wong, OCAD (irc: harriswong, github: harriswong, twitter: @superharris25) 
19. Jennison Asuncion (~Tue afternoon), IT Accessibility Consultant (twitter: @jennison)
20. Candace Soderston, Kuali Rice project, University of Washington
21. William Washington, Kuali Student project, University of Washington
22. Jerry Neal, Kuali Rice project, Indiana University
23. Heidi Valles, OCAD (irc: heidi_, github: heidiv, twitter: @heidiwork)
24. (add your name here)

Accommodations

Here are a few hotels nearby the Ontario College of Art and Design, where the Hackathon will be held. We'll be adding other accommodation suggestions over the next few weeks.

Talks

Hoping for one or two people present some comprehensive info on these topics at the start of each day.

• Overview of accessibility frameworks, browsers and screenreaders
• Overview of ARIA specification, DHTML styleguide, how those are created and developed
• Overview to Fluid Infusion Project / Demos
• Hans Hillen: Practical ARIA Tips, Tricks and Pitfalls (MS Powerpoint slides: ARIA Hackathon.pptx, contact Hans if you require a different format)
• ... 

Program

• create a list of supported AT
• what, if any, devices do we test against besides screen readers?
• document how we make decisions about implementations when real world use and ARIA/DHTML style guide conflict
• document process for attempting to change the ARIA spec, best practices or DHTML style guide
• document any decisions we've made where we intentionally went against the spec or against a known working solution
• full accessibility notes for redesigned and new widgets
• accordion
• autocomplete
• menu
• menubar
• popup 
• tabs
• tooltip 
• high contrast mode
• jquery-a11y thread
• detect high contrast mode
• what does each widget need to do to adjust?
• what adjustments do we need in themes? 
•  multi-word autocomplete
• jquery-a11y thread
• current implementation only works for single words because we update the text field that has focus
• proposed work-around from Rich 
• tabs
• see work by Felix and Hans
• accordion and the tab role
• jquery-a11y thread
• constant need to switch between app and document mode
• create standard key command for switching between tab and panel
• menu and aria-orientation
• jquery-a11y thread 
• distinguishing between horizontal and vertical menus and menubars
• there's a mixture between behavior and visuals that is very hard to express semantically and automatically
• this must be automatic because users will never get it right on their own
• keyboard drag/resize
• demo
• need a plan for normalizing between mouse, touch, keyboard, possibly even others, e.g., wiimote 
• Popup and aria-owns:
• "JAWS will consider the dialog to be part of the trigger element, and because of that it will not announce the dialog itself before announcing the focused element inside of it when the popup expands. Only when moving focus away from both the trigger element and the popup and back into the popup JAWS will announce the dialog properly." --hanshillen 

Support and Testing targets:

• support latest NVDA on latest Firefox
• test against latest NVDA, VoiceOver, JAWS
• we'll accept patches for other/older AT if:
• the code is maintainable/not super hacky
• relatively small file size
• doesn't break proper ARIA for conforming AT 

Some resources:

• Overview of ARIA documents: http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/aria.php#is
• Sending Feedback: http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/comments/instructions  
• Access Key Companion: http://juicystudio.com/article/access-key-companion.php 
• Screenreader User Survey: http://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey3/#primary 
• Overview of html5/accessibility implementations status: http://www.html5accessibility.com/ 
• ARIA example:
• http://oaa-accessibility.org/examples/  
• http://examples.furtherahead.com (note: these are Derek's demos at presentations not final products but I like these examples for their practicality) 
• http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/category/wai-aria/ 

Testing ARIA tools:

• Windows-specific: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/seealso/archive/2010/07/22/where-did-the-accessibility-tools-go.aspx
• AccProbe: http://accessibility.linuxfoundation.org/a11yweb/util/accprobe/ 
• UIA Verify: http://uiautomationverify.codeplex.com/
• aViewer: http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2010/06/aviewer-beta/ 
• Web Accessibility Checked (kinda like HTML Validator): http://achecker.ca/checker/index.php