How can Auro support a11y better?

[blackfalcon]

The problem

Supporting digital accessibility with front-end development is difficult at best. One real issue is that digital accessibility is somewhat an invisible requirement. Most developers do not use the tools required for users who require additional support. To support this Auro has taken this responsibility very seriously to ensure that our web components meet all reasonable accessibility expectations. But what we lack is the documentation to support our users of these capabilities.

The recommendation

Auro has always been and will remain dedicated to supporting best practices and meeting all standards of accessibility for Alaska Airlines user interfaces.

One example of this commitment is this accessibility page for auro-hyperlink. Here Auro clearly documents the elements support for accessibility and opinions on best practices.

It is the goal of Auro with each component to clearly document the element's accessibility features. A great example of how this can be done is to use this W3C documentation as a reference.

Expected outcomes

The hope here is that Auro will be able to clearly communicate it's intent for supporting accessibility and ensuring its users that this is a competent capability that Auro takes very seriously.

[blackfalcon]

Something that we need to ensure is that our personally developed components 100% meet the expectations laid out in the W3C examples. https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/ These components include:

1. Accordion
2. Alert
3. Dialogs (modals) and drawers
4. breadcrumb
5. button
6. carousel
7. checkbox
8. combobox
9. hyperlink
10. list box / menu
11. menu and menu bar, menu button / dropdown
12. radio buttons (group)
13. table
14. tooltip

[blackfalcon]

Another topic to add to this where Auro hasn't done the best job is traditional HTML5 semantic support. E.g. we are building custom elements that have defined HTML5 roles and Auro is not correctly supporting them.

Here are issues for auro-sidenav to update semantic containers.

• Update element to support native semantic definitions  auro-sidenav#16
• Update element to support native semantic definitions auro-nav#38