Dynamic injection of WAI-ARIA into web content

Abstract

WAI-ARIA enables Web developers to make dynamic content accessible to users of assistive technologies (ATs) but there remain many sites on the Web that do not use it. Unfortunately the default behaviour of ATs when handling such pages is often sub-optimal, leaving users struggling to use the content. We present ACup: a flexible approach that injects JavaScript into the page to detect and classify any changes to the Document Object Model (DOM). These changes are then presented to the user using a WAI-ARIA live region that was injected when the page was loaded. The style of presentation varies according to the characteristics of each update (using rules previously bound to be effective) and can simply be changed, for example to test novel presentation approaches, or to apply a more fine-grained classification. This may be used to enable AT users to benefit more rapidly from advances in user-interface design.