Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by devongovett 1866 days ago
This is very bad for accessibility. Rendering things in canvas means there is no DOM, which means nothing for screen readers to read. To be fair, the old google docs editor was also very bad for a11y, but at least there was potential to improve it. This removes that option. They could have worked with the Chrome team to help improve standards for everyone, but decided to reimplement the rendering engine from scratch without regard for accessibility. I'm very disappointed that this wasn't flagged at a company the size of Google.
1 comments
lhnz 1866 days ago
The example that Google shows in their post has accessibility features [0], although currently these need to be switched on with a keyboard shortcut (⌘+Option+Z).

Pay attention to `document.getElementById('docs-aria-speakable')`.

[0] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1N1XaAI4ZlCUHNWJBXJUBFjxS...

link
devongovett 1866 days ago
Yeah it's pretty bad to have accessibility be a mode though. Also, since it's completely non-standard, the usual screen reader navigation keys don't work as expected and users have to learn a completely custom interface. Better than nothing but it's not great.
link