Introducing AT Driver

A proposed standard for automating assistive technologies

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@bocoup

Who are we?

The ARIA and Assistive Technology Community Group (a.k.a. ARIA-AT) is a W3C community group with a diverse membership including

• standards experts
• accessibility consultants
• web developers
• assistive technology users

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@bocoup

How should you be listening?

Think about how AT-Driver can be implemented for:

• Browser accessibility testing
• Web dev tools e.g. AT rendering of Web Apps
• Design tools e.g. AT rendering of Figma

@bocoup

Problem statement

There are too many barriers to building accessible web applications.

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@bocoup

Which barriers are we trying to clear?

1. AT rendering of web code is not sufficiently predictable.
2. Web developers must expend a lot of effort to understand how their work is perceived through ATs

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@bocoup

We will solve this through coordination

Just like on the early web, the lack of consensus is negatively impacting authors and users.

• Web developers don’t always know all of the edge cases (and even experts have differing expectations)
• General-purpose testing tools can’t be built

@bocoup

What is AT Driver?

• A programming interface for automating assistive technologies
• A W3C Community Group Draft Report
• A protocol using WebSockets for transport
• Inspired by WebDriver and WebDriver-Bidi

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https://w3c.github.io/at-driver/

@bocoup

AT-Driver Capabilities

• Programmatically observing speech
• Simulating keyboard interaction
• Modifying AT settings

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How can a protocol inspire best practices?

Web developers want to do a better job, but there is too much friction today.

Proof positive: the success of the WebDriver protocol and the proliferation of client libraries

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Where are we with the spec?

• Currently working on an an interop test suite built on top of AT-Driver to automate data collection for interoperability test suite ARIA-AT that will be compatible with the NVDA screen reader.
• See aria-at.w3.org
• APG Example: Alert
• Added to Browser Tools and Testing Charter
• Support from Vispero (Jaws Screen reader) & NVDA
• Vispero & NVDA representatives to join BTT

@bocoup

Other accessibility testing technologies

• We’re also working on accessibility tree dump testing tools in WPT Interop 2024, which tests at layer, and is complementary to AT-Driver.

@bocoup

Call to action

• If you work at company that makes a screen reader, let that team know about this, and invite them to join
• Think about using this tech to test your browsers
• We’re also thinking about web dev tools and design tools

@bocoup