Look Ma, no ARIA

Abstract

Once simple and static, many web pages have now evolved into complex web applications. Hundreds of web development libraries provide ready-to-use custom widgets, which can be further customized to fit the needs of individual web applications. Web developers are supposed to use ARIA specifications to make widgets accessible to screen readers; however, ARIA markup is often used incorrectly and inconsistently, and sometimes even missing in webpages altogether. Given a wide selection of widgets and a lack of proper ARIA support, accessing content of custom widgets in web pages with screen readers has been a challenge for blind users. As a result, blind users cannot benefit from the convenience of using these widgets or, even worse, get stuck on inaccessible content. In our previous work, we showed that custom dynamic widgets could be automatically detected and classified as soon as they appear in web pages. In this paper, we propose to make such widgets accessible by providing generic interfaces for widgets of a particular class. We show how this can be accomplished on the example of Web Chat widget. To demonstrate the usability of the resulting chat interface, we report on the results of a user study with 18 blind screen-reader users.