Article

Meeting Accessibility Challenges with Web Components

Web Components comprise a suite of technologies under development by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that together enable standard formats such as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) to be extended with new functionality. Web Components encapsulate presentation and behavior in a reusable fashion that coheres well with the markup languages and development practices of the Web. We briefly review the constituents of Web Component technology - custom elements, the shadow DOM, HTML imports, and the HTML 5 template element. We then argue that Web Components are a general mechanism that can be used to address problems, some of them long-standing, of Web accessibility. Our argument proceeds via a series of examples that illustrate the utility of Web Components as means of enhancing non-visual access to images, providing spoken and braille alternatives to textual content, and implementing custom interactive controls with features that improve access while bringing to the fore the underlying semantics of the content. Although the design of our Web Components is motivated by educational needs, they and the broader approach to solving accessibility challenges which they exemplify are applicable to the Web as a whole.

Items in ScholarWorks are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.