Accessibility being our niche, we were really willing and passionate about contributing to the Rails community through our expertise. Our desire to do so came true when we had interactions with Eric Hodel. Thanks to re-tweets by Steve Klabnik . Eric is a Ruby expert and RDoc contributor. He was looking for someone who could support in verifying as well as implementing accessibility in RDoc . We simply grabbed this opportunity and have started contributing with some valuable suggestions as well as solutions.
To list a few –
A) Page structure:
Screen Reader user operates the computer using Keyboard only. So the Screen Reader provides certain shortcuts for easy navigation. But the structure of the web page should be designed taking into consideration the navigation mechanism provided by Screen Readers. To illustrate this – JAWS, NVDA & ORCA – which are widely used Screen Readers, provide a shortcut key ‘H’ to jump to headings in a web page. So the main content in a web page should be given heading ‘H1’ and then the subsequent content should be H2 or H3 and So on. These inputs helped Eric in making RDoc pages, which he is working on, more accessible.
B) ARIA Roles and Properties:
Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) have become very popular among the web community. And W3C has laid down certain guidelines to make RIAs accessible through ARIA Roles and Properties. We have studied ARIA guidelines in detail and this helped us provide valuable inputs to apply apt ARIA Roles and Properties to the relevant sections in RDoc.
We are still contributing to this initiative by Eric and will continue doing so till RDoc is completely accessible.
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