Vertical Slides Invisible to JAWS Users.

[bagofarms]

When viewing a presentation using JAWS, all slides that have children (vertical slides) are invisible to the screen reader. The current workaround is to exit live buffer mode, navigate using the keyboard, re-enter live buffer mode, then use the arrow keys to force the buffer to refresh.

It looks like this is caused by the ".reveal .slides>section, .reveal .slides>section>section" selector having "display: none" before that slide is revealed. Nodes with this property are invisible to JAWS.

I have experimented with changing this property to "block", which fixes the issue, and it doesn't significantly degrade the look and feel of the presentation.

Maybe this is part of a larger discussion of making this tool accessible. One easy solution would be to provide a "view transcript" or "flat view" link that displays all of the content on one page.

[hakimel]

The framework hides any slide that is more than three steps away using display: none for performance reasons. JavaScript controls that. It seems however that when the next slide is vertical, this logic is failing and all of the vertical slides are invisible until navigating to the stack. Would correcting this be of any help? I have no experience in using a screen reader or working with accessibility.

Including the PDF print CSS file without media=print would render the presentation in a flat view that should be accessible. However that doesn't seem like a good solution, ideally the regular presentation is accessible.

[bagofarms]

Fixing that issue would help, but I didn't realize that the slides are hidden more than 3 steps away. One person in my office suggested using a tag with role="alert" to tell screen reader users to go out of Live Buffer mode and use the keyboard controls. Then, each slide should use ARIA attributes to push the content of the slide to the screen reader whenever that slide is shown visually.

Of course, that's easier said than done, but it's an idea. We'll keep knocking this around the office to see what people think. In the meantime, the print view and the workaround i described in my first post will work.

Essentially, we're trying to find a replacement for Powerpoint files in online courses, and reveal.js seems to be the best, most accessible option so far. We're still investigating, so this isn't a pressing issue, but we'll see if we can come up with the best solution.

[hakimel]

The issue with vertical slides remaining hidden that I mentioned above has been fixed. Hopefully that corrects the original problem.

Closing this but do let me know if you discover any other changes that could be made to make the framework more accessible.