[NFBCS] [program-l] Blog: Future of Browser and Screen Reader Interaction

[Tony Malykh]

I strongly disagree with the guy. Virtual buffers offer much more 
flexibility on the screenreader side. Without virtual buffers 
screenreaders would only be able to retrieve limited kind of information 
from the browsers, so likely existing functionality will have to be 
dropped if browsers stop supporting virtual buffers. For example, 
Add-ons like BrowserNav can only exist in a system with virtual buffers, 
since they work with virtual buffers in a peculiar way: doing regexp 
search, analyzing text attributes, etc. I think it is not likely that 
without virtual buffers browser makers will for example implement regex 
search into their API - think for example of Google Docs accessibility, 
this is an example of a company deciding on thier own accessibility API 
and deciding to go with the bare minimum. For example, Google Docs still 
haven't implemented sentence navigation. I have been developing 
NVDA-related add-ons on and off for more than 7 years now and in my 
experience, the job of application makers is to provide a generic and 
flexible interface - like virtual buffers via IAccessible2, instead of 
set of concrete features, because inevitably if they provide only 
concrete features, that's not going to be enough for advanced use cases. 
So TLDR, not sure who is this guy, but hope his vision of virtual buffer 
free world turns out to be false.


On 10/5/2017 7:02 AM, Rasmussen, Lloyd wrote:
> Marco Zehe's blog is always worth reading. As we think about problems with Edge, Chrome, Firefox, Safari and other browsers, and the new requirements for browsers and other apps to feed the most useful information to assistive technology without creating "event floods," this is a good blog to read and think about:
>    https://www.marcozehe.de/2017/09/29/rethinking-web-accessibility-on-windows/
>
> Lloyd Rasmussen, Senior Staff Engineer
> National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, Library of Congress
> Washington, DC 20542   202-707-0535
> http://www.loc.gov/nls/
> The preceding opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Library of Congress, NLS.
>
>
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