What is WCAG

• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
• Contains success Criteria (SCs) to determine whether or not user needs are met
• Applies to web content: web authors, developers, designers, content authors
• Published by W3C/WAI

Existing accessibility requirements for browsers

• Browsers are non-web software
• EN 301 549:
  • Clause 11 (Non-Web Software)
• Section 508:
  • Chapter 2: Scoping Requirements (Section E205 & E207)
  • Chapter 3: Functional Performance Criteria
  • Chapter 5: Software (Section 503)

Why should browser vendors engage?

• Major benefits for users in general
• Browser vendors are also web authors
• Consolidating these improvements leads to less accessibility requirements
• Bigger accessibility impact with less effort across the stack

How browsers are already helping

Parsing

• Forgiving parsing of HTML author errors, including:
  • Unclosed open tags
  • Incorrect element nesting
  • Duplicate attributes
  • Non-unique IDs
• SC 4.1.1 Parsing removed from WCAG 2.2

Focus visible

• Currently available:
  • Default focus outline
  • Enhanced focus indicators

Improving Focus

• Improve contrast of the default focus indicator
• Allow customizing how much time enhanced focus indicator remains visible

Contrast

• Currently available:
  • High contrast mode

Improving contrast

• Allow users to set their own color schemas
• Improve default contrast choices (light on dark, dark on light, lower-contrast, etc)

Zoom

• Currently available:
  • Easier to zoom in order to see the content (especially in smaller screens)

Improving zoom

• Allow customizing the width of the column view to avoid horizontal scrolling

Autoplay

• Currently available:
  • Browser settings to stop media from autoplaying

Improving autoplay

• Allow users to set their own preferences for media that autoplays

Additional accessibility fixes

Page structure

• Allow keyboard users to navigate the page structure elements using the keyboard

Keyboard access

• Allow keyboard access to tooltips, similarly to how hover works
• Resolve potential keyboard traps created by badly designed widgets

Infer missing page structure elements

• Headings
• Paragraphs
• List items
• Data tables
• ... Could be inferred based on visual cues, such as font size, spacing, etc.

Moving content

• Allow users to stop animations and moving content

Improve discoverability of accessibility features

• Promote existing accessibility features by making them easier to discover and configure
• Present these settings on profile setup for more straightforward access

Improvements to devtools: Helping web authors make accessible websites

Help web developers understand:

• How information gets into the accessibility tree
• Accessibility errors
• Browser fixes

How information gets into the accessibility tree

Help web developers understand accessibility errors and browser fixes

Surface an error in the console when bad ARIA markup is discarded:

• When using `aria-hidden`: if there is a focusable element in the subtree, `aria-hidden` is ignored.
• `role=none` is ignored when an element is focusable, or some ARIA attributes.

Helping web authors design accessible websites?

An accessibility tree visualizer in devtools:

• Show widgets and text in focus and accessibility tree order
• Clearly mark landmark regions