How to make arbitrary text selections in a screen reader render visually

[Justin Obara]

I think an added issue though is that you’d still want to allow the user to
interact with the document as though they are reading a document. If we
were to mark the entire page as application, the users of ATs that support
a virtual buffer would lose the ability to navigate the content with many
of the navigation aids that the AT provides. Perhaps there’s a quick way to
drop in and out of application mode, that is, to change the mode of the
page when the user wants to make an annotation. However, I could see this
as being confusing for the user and may make selections more difficult for
them, depending on what it is they want to annotate. It’s almost as if we
want a quick and easy way to mark in/out points and apply the annotations
to those ranges.

Thanks
Justin


On February 2, 2017 at 10:55:30 AM, Harnum, Alan (aharnum at ocadu.ca) wrote:

I don't have great suggestions at first glance but I found the two links
helpful in reading about the issue
-  https://wiki.mozilla.org/Accessibility/Virtual_buffer_smash
- http://tink.uk/understanding-screen-reader-interaction-modes/

It seems to me that the practical answer lies somewhere in indicating with
ARIA that a section of page text is interaction-driven, causing the screen
reader to operate in application mode, and bypassing the virtual buffer
behaviour entirely. I don't know what that might look like in practice, but
to the extent I understand the virtual buffer it seems the solution would
have to involve bypassing it entirely somehow


From: fluid-work <fluid-work-bounces at lists.idrc.ocad.ca> on behalf of
"Hung, Jonathan" <jhung at ocadu.ca>
Date: Wednesday, February 1, 2017 at 11:22 AM
To: Fluid Work <fluid-work at fluidproject.org>
Subject: How to make arbitrary text selections in a screen reader render
visually

Hi everyone,

In many of our designs (i.e. Metadata authoring, My Lifelong Learning, UI
Options, and OER Authoring Tool) we have a feature which allows a user to
select any arbitrary text and “do something with it”. This can take many
forms such as:

* Selecting text to make an annotation
* Selecting text to perform some formatting (i.e. make it bold, or insert a
link)
* Mark a section that has a footnote or citation

A tricky implementation issue has been brought up by our friends at
Hypothes.is:

If a user is using a screen reader and keyboard to interact with the
website content, how do you get the interactions with the AT’s screen
buffer to render visually? The issue here is that screen readers that use
Virtual Buffers (like NVDA and JAWS), the user interacts with the buffer
and nothing in the browser is affected. This is unfortunate for a screen
reader user who has vision as they do not get any visual cues.

How would one implement a selection feature such that a user of a screen
reader (with a virtual buffer) can make selections, and for the selections
in the virtual buffer to appear visually in the browser? Is this even a
good approach, or is there another way?

Thoughts and suggestions appreciated.

- Jon.

---
Jonathan Hung, Inclusive Designer
Email: jhung at ocadu.ca
OCAD University
Inclusive Design Research Centre

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