(I thought "Android a11y" was going to be Ally Ogilvie :) ) Some thoughts inline:
On Thu, Aug 29, 2013 at 1:25 PM, Joe Bowser <[email protected]> wrote: > Hey > > The last week, I've been doing some preliminary work on Android > accessibility, and after fiddling with Cordova, I've come to some > pretty bad realizations: > > 1. Android Accessibility in a WebView is achieved the same way we do > PhoneGap, except that their JS is injected from a static server. This > means that if the app is offline, it's not accessible to the blind > Do you mean that this is true for most android applications / web sites, but that Cordova is currently better than that? (Or that PhoneGap is better than that, at least?) > > 2. Most of Android isn't actually accessible, namely the Play Store, > which is how most people discover apps. "Play Store, Play Store, Play > Store, Play Store" doesn't seem super useful. > > 3. There's no real point trying to make accessibility work on > Gingerbread, since the accessibility libraries don't really work on > that platform, and aren't as robust. > > 4. Accessibility is HARD, especially when you're not blind. > Agreed. It takes an extra level of attention to detail to get that sort of stuff right, and you have to constantly stay on top of it. > > 5. The splashscreen says "Alert". WTF? > Is this the Cordova app splashscreen? That's really strange, unless something is intercepting / reading out the prompt call from the bridge. Although in that case, I would expect it to happen pretty much continuously through an app. > > So, one major issue that I ran into is that you have to whitelist > gstatic.com so that you can get the Accessibility Javascript. It'd be > great to see how the accessibility JS works and communicates with the > two interfaces that it adds to the WebView. > If there's an A11y plugin, then that can be added with <plugin.xml>. If this should be a core feature, then we can easily build it in to the whitelist, and enable it by default, like we do with file:///* and android-asset://* urls. Ian > BTW: Here's the Java portion of Accessibility on the WebView: > > https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/master/core/java/android/webkit/AccessibilityInjector.java > > Any ideas on how we can take advantage of this, make it better when > we're offline. Right now, it just treats the webview as one giant > view. Thoughts on this would be great. > > Joe >
