dojotoolkit & accessibility

[denise]

In discussion in #gsoc this afternoon, one of the project mentors from DojoToolkit mentioned that they're the first JS toolkit with full accessibility support in their base widgets. We should totally look into it!

(Edit: He also PMed me to say: "if you have immediate questions, our community info can be found here: http://dojotoolkit.org/get-involved/ and I can be found here: http://ktiedt.dojotoolkit.org/gsoc/2010/karl.html", and offered whatever help we would need with integration ... his DW username is ktiedt, so welcome.)

Comments

[afuna]

We definitely want to phase out the old library! But it's been tagged a bit of a long term project so far.

[jadelennox]

Fu, from my reading, the real gain here is something that we wouldn't get from jQuery, which is the widget library, which has the vaunted accessibility features. How should we go about exploring this to see if it's worth further exploration given the cycles which have been put into jQuery so far? Should we have the various accessibility testers test the available widgets to see if we really do find them accessible?

[ktiedt]

I am volunteering to help in conversion if yall deem the accessibility worthy :)
Our a11y team is actually headed by a group from IBM (which has vested interest in keeping a11y a high priority) so its always a forefront of discussion in that regards (and tested all the time by them)

I would recommend doing testing at: http://archive.dojotoolkitorg/nightly/dojotoolkit/dijit/tests/ which will be our current nightly checkout (from the night before) which will closest resemble our 1.5 release which is coming out soon (went beta today IIRC)

[afuna]

That would be terrific! I know that the widget framework for jQuery has WAI-ARIA support, but I don't know how extensive it is in practical use. There's also theming so it's easy to make light-on-dark as well as dark-on-light and the ability to turn off animations entirely, but other things like keyboard navigability or similar, I'm afraid I know nothing about.

Hmm, here are the jQuery demos for testing (I think the widgets column is what you'll be after?)


I used Dojo for one project, a long time ago, but it was a one-off, and I wasn't looking at it with an eye towards accessibility -- I'm just about to start looking through the links that ktiedt provided to learn more.

Anyway, I'm really interested to see how both of these stack up, and whether either is a clear winner, or whether it could go either way, and if we could get real world information that would be fantastic.