Play/pause controls are not accessible with keyboard

[vosnier]

Play/pause controls can only be activated with a mouse. In order to make the controls accessible for blind users, they need to be focusable when navigating with keyboard and it should be possible to play and pause the audio using the keyboard only.

[JoeGermuska]

cleaning out the open issues.

We acknowledge that this is true, and it would be a worthy effort to improve SoundCite's accessibility.

The tool is not under active development, but we would gladly accept a pull request; if not, there may yet be a time when we are able to direct energy to this issue.

[aarongustafson]

@vosnier I was running into this as well. Did you have specific thoughts in mind? I was thinking of the following:

• role="button"
• tabindex="0"

I feel like we need to figure labelling & status as well. Some sort of indication of what the button does and when it’s playing.

[JoeGermuska]

As noted above, we would welcome a PR that addresses this.

I feel like there are potential complications in how clips interact with other content on the page, specifically if we try to determine the correct tabindex in a vacuum. Even absent interactions, it's entirely possible that people would not create clips in the order that they use them on their page.

The role attribute seems easy enough, and there's a natural hook to change a label from 'playing' to something else when the classes are changed to control the appearance of the ▶️/⏸ indicator.

[aarongustafson]

I feel like there are potential complications in how clips interact with other content on the page, specifically if we try to determine the correct tabindex in a vacuum. Even absent interactions, it's entirely possible that people would not create clips in the order that they use them on their page.

A tabindex of 0 is always in the normal flow (it just makes it keyboard-focusable). The interaction would be analogous to a link.

The role attribute seems easy enough, and there's a natural hook to change a label from 'playing' to something else when the classes are changed to control the appearance of the ▶️/⏸ indicator.

That's my thought as well. Still need to explain what the button does to folks, but I think we can figure that out too. A colleague of mine is talking a look at this as well. We specialize in accessibility, so we'll make sure the PR meets the necessary quality threshold there.

[vnessamartinez]

Hi, @aarongustafson. May I ask how far you are in the process? A colleague was interested in using this tool for a project this month, but we noticed that it's not accessible. Is there anything that we can do to help?

[aarongustafson]

Hi, @aarongustafson. May I ask how far you are in the process? A colleague was interested in using this tool for a project this month, but we noticed that it's not accessible. Is there anything that we can do to help?

Adding @JGibson2019, who was looking into this.

[JGibson2019]

Hey all! I haven't gotten to this issue yet but wanted to update the thread in case anyone else has spare cycles! Otherwise, I'll circle back later this spring :)