ARIA AT Automation meeting: March 14, 2022

[zcorpan]

The next ARIA AT automation meeting will be on March 14 at 3pm ET. (The meeting was moved from Feb 28.)

As discussed in yesterday's call, we plan to invite screen reader vendors as well as screen reader automation framework authors to the next meeting to review the material we have so far and align on the guiding use cases for screen reader automation standardization going forward.

Suggested discussion topics:

• Introduction and current status
• ARIA-AT Automation API Explainer - please read this before the meeting if possible
• Request for comment: screen reader settings
• Needs for automated conformance testing of screen readers (ARIA-AT) vs automated screen reader tests for web apps/web pages
• Venue for screen reader automation API standard, interest of participation (ARIA-AT CG, WICG, or other)
• Preference for future communication (regular meetings?)

[zcorpan]

For additional context, also see the Status Report for ARIA-AT Automation from December 2021.

[zcorpan]

We need to move this meeting to March 14, as we needed some more time to prepare. Apologies for the late change.

In addition, I think it might be a good idea to split into two meetings, one where we invite AT vendors and later one where we invite AT automation tool implementers. This is so we can properly prepare and have more productive discussion with each group. To clarify, I suggest:

• March 14: meet with AT vendors
• March 28: meet with AT automation tool implementers

[zcorpan]

Meeting details at https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-aria-at/2022Mar/0004.html

[zcorpan]

Meeting minutes: https://www.w3.org/2022/03/14-aria-at-minutes.html

Themes of discussion:

• Scope and goals
• Security considerations
• API to simulate keypresses
• API to invoke screen reader commands (e.g. navigate to the next heading)
• Venue
  • ARIA-AT CG for now
• Meeting cadence
  • monthly meetings + async discussion in GitHub

We'll file new issues for each topic.

[zcorpan]

Meeting minutes from yesterday's meeting: https://www.w3.org/2022/03/28-aria-at-minutes.html

A few points I recall from the meeting and from scanning the minutes:

• Discussion about a possible headless mode for ATs and/or a concept of sessions
• There is a need for downloading and installing screen readers with a script (e.g. in a CI environment)
• Software licensing of screen readers
• Ease of setup locally and in CI is important
• David Emmanuel discussed the approach of AssistiveWebDriver, where the screen reader is in a VM. Allows for better accuracy and parallel testing, but there are some problems with running in CI (e.g. GitHub Actions).
• Steven Lambert expressed the need to be able to test with different verbosity settings, and that normalizing between screen readers would make it easier to write assertions that apply to multiple ATs.

[zcorpan]

Next ARIA AT Automation Group Meeting is today: https://github.com/w3c/aria-at-automation/issues/18