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phetsims / reactants-products-and-leftovers

"Reactants, Products and Leftovers" is an educational simulation in HTML5, by PhET Interactive Simulations.
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Evaluate the state of a11y features #76

Closed pixelzoom closed 1 year ago

pixelzoom commented 1 year ago

In a Slack DM, I asked @jessegreenberg and @zepumph:

RPAL is potentially going to resume work, adding PhET-iO and dynamic locale.

I noticed that you added keyboard navigation in https://github.com/phetsims/reactants-products-and-leftovers/issues/55. But keyboard navigation does not work for me when running the sim.

It also looks like some description work was also done at the ScreenView level, see https://github.com/phetsims/joist/issues/355#issuecomment-338349680, but I don’t see those descriptions in master.

I haven’t been able to piece together what you were doing based on the GitHub issues and commits. Can you tell me more about what you did, and why, so that I can evaluate what needs to be done?

jessegreenberg commented 1 year ago

I reviewed the history. It looks like changes were small and then we decided not to work on this sim. Changes happened between 9/21/2017 and 10/20/2017. "a11y" commits after this window are related to regenerating the "a11y-view" in all sims (nothing sim specific).

Relevant changes I saw were:

RPAL is no longer listed in perennial/data/interactive-description. The traversal order/focus management code will have no effect and can be removed if you prefer.

This would still be an easy sim to add alt-input to if PhET is interested. Work will be related to traversal order and focus management while changing game screens and as buttons pop in and out. Its possible a developer could quickly make good decisions about these without needing to involve design team (not to exclude, but take less design team and overhead time).

pixelzoom commented 1 year ago

I'm guessing that the focus traversal isn't working because package.json does not contain "supportsInteractiveDescription": true.

And it looks like this.accessibleOrder was changed to this.pdomOrder throughout.

pixelzoom commented 1 year ago

@jessegreenberg said:

RPAL is no longer listed in perennial/data/interactive-description. The traversal order/focus management code will have no effect and can be removed if you prefer.

@jessegreenberg @zepumph @kathy-phet FYI... I totally removed focus traversal code in the above commit. I tried to work around it while doing TypeScript conversion #80 and PhET-iO instrumentation #78. But it was getting in my way, and slowing me down. Some of that code had TypeScript errors. And (as is typical with a retrofit) PhET-iO instrumentation requires major changes to this sim. So when this sim does get "alternative input" someday, I think it's best if we start with a clean slate.

Closing.