Bringing accessibility support for widgets

[Marek Lewandowski]

We should think about providing good a11y for widget.

Currently screen readers treats every widget as the end of an element. We need to do far better than that.

The most important requirements i see at the moment are:

• labels for widgets
• labels for editables

labels for widgets

• Should be context sensitive, by that i mean they should be diffrent for image, placeholder, mathjax and codesnippet
• Label should be also possible to fetch some information from widget instance itself, i.e. image should be have its alt attribute included into label
• Should be specified in widget definition

labels for editables

Here i have no clear conception as of yet, because you're only able to access editable using the tab key, but it iterates from the very beginning of the document, rather than current caret position.

Currently 2 solutions come to my mind:

Solution 1

• leave current keyboard as it is
• upon getting into editable, user should be informed what widget editable belongs to

Solution 2

• Allow only to enter into editable (with tab key) only when widget is focused
• We don't need to inform our end-user what widget he's in (that reduces extra time spent on listening). The only one information he will need is the name of editable itself
• Important implementation detail would be to allow focus cycling inside widget

[Jakub Ś]

I will just confirm this issue (I'm clueless myself :)) because we need it.

[Piotrek Koszuliński]

DUP reported #13379.

[Marek Lewandowski]

This issue has been discussed by our team recently. Here are the propositions of fixes that we'd like to solve:

• Provide a way for a proper labelling.

Widgets need a way to be labeled accrodingly. We should provide a function that will allow to customize it's label, because one might like to provide a detailed enough information throught the widget label.

E.g. assuming that widget is a youtube link one might want to fetch movie title, and provide a label like embedded "Rebecca Black - Friday" youtube video.

Also we might need to provide a better discoverability for nested editables. Take ​simplebox plugin as an example, first editable should state that it's some sort of header/title part and the other is meant to be a content.

• Focusing inner parts:
  • editables
  • non-editables Provide a convenient keystroke to enter into the widget, a hotkey to cycle over such parts (back and forth).

Possibly a keystroke to move out from the widget to the editor content.

• Remove editables from the tab order

Rationale: pressing the tab key in the editor should bring the focus to next focusable item after the editor. Now it includes also widget editables which is counterintuitive.

[Marek Lewandowski]

Related issues #12235 #12236 and #14837.