Microsoft Announces new Developer Tool meant to make ‘a more accessible web’

In a post published on the Windows blog, Microsoft’s Evelynn Kaplan and Patrick Brosset shared news on Monday of a newly-released developer tool called ARIA Notify. The public API is touted as “[making] web content changes more accessible to all users.” The tool is “an ergonomic and predictable way to tell assistive technologies (ATs), such as screen readers, exactly what to announce to users and when.”

ARIA Notify is available today as an Origin Trial beginning with Microsoft Edge 136. It can be used locally by enabling the --enable-blink-features=AriaNotify feature flag.

“ARIA Notify is designed to address scenarios where a visual change that’s not tied to a DOM [Document Object Model] change and not accessible to assistive technology users, happens in the page. Examples include changing the format of text in a document, or when a person joins a video conference call,” Kaplan and Brosset write of the API’s raison d'être. “Developers have come to rely on ARIA live regions as a limited workaround. ARIA Notify is an imperative notification API that’s designed to replace the usage of ARIA live regions, and overcome its limitations, in these scenarios.”

Kaplan and Brosset explain Microsoft’s motivation for releasing ARIA Notify stems from the challenges faced by Blind and low vision people to identify user interface changes they didn’t initiate on their own volition. ARIA live regions, the post goes on to say, “are the only mechanism available today that communicates dynamic content changes to users of assistive technology.” The problem, of course, is these ARIA live regions are “tightly coupled” with DOM elements predicated on the notion visual changes happen within the UI of a webpage. Many changes, however, happen without the DOM being modified. Kaplan and Brosset cite several examples of this occurrence, including a user in a text-editing field and using the Ctrl+B keyboard shortcut to embolden text. In this case, the person still should get audible conformation of the event occurring despite “no UI elements [being] used by the user, and the DOM didn’t necessarily change.”

Microsoft posted an ARIA Notify explainer and encourages feedback via its GitHub repo.