Ajax live regions: ReefChat using the fire vox screen reader as a case example

  • Authors:
  • Peter Thiessen;Charles Chen

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario;The University of Texas at Austin

  • Venue:
  • W4A '07 Proceedings of the 2007 international cross-disciplinary conference on Web accessibility (W4A)
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Web 2.0 enabled by the Ajax architecture has given rise to a new level of user interactivity through web browsers. Many new and extremely popular Web applications have been introduced such as Google Maps, Google Docs, Flickr, and so on. Ajax Toolkits such as Dojo allow web developers to build Web 2.0 applications quickly and with little effort. Unfortunately, the accessibility support in most toolkits and Ajax applications overall is lacking. WAI-ARIA markup for live regions presents a solution to making these applications accessible. To address this problem we developed an Accessible Ajax chat application called ReefChat and the Fire Vox screen reader. Features include, chat message notification through live regions to notify the AT. As well as keying up and down messages to navigate through chat messages, and keying left and right to filter messages from specific users. In this paper after briefly discussing the problem of Web 2.0, we describe our accessible chat application and screen reader.