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GOALS.md

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ally.js goals

The ultimate goal is to make the development of apps adhering to WAI-ARIA a breeze. The ultimatest™ goal is to make this library obsolete by lobbying the W3C and browser vendors into supporting the basic tools provided by ally.js. (One may dream…)

Applications have to deal with quite a number of different issues to get to a state we may call "accessible." There's the issue of maintaining the focus, a subset of providing keyboard navigation. Then there's WAI-ARIA, which helps the browser provide the operating system's Accessibility Infrastructure with the necessary details.

Documents like WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices try to explain what needs to be done, but even though the documents have been "dumbed down", they're still too convoluted to allow quickly understanding things. With ally.js we want to take that document and turn it into generic, reusable JavaScript.

It does not make sense to implement the same things over and over again, which is why ally.js is designed in a way that exposes every function individually (i.e. it is "modular"), to allow simple integration in other libraries. The modularity is paramount for preventing application and library authors from copy-pasting code, or worse, rolling their own flawed implementations. While ally.js is not perfect (it's software, it's written by me, …), I want to make this the place we focus our efforts - much like has happened for the DOM by way of jQuery.

With ally.js v1.0.0 I've laid the foundation for a library solving the "stupid problems" (like "what is focusable?") so developers won't have to anymore. Here are the topics I'd cover next (not necessarily in that order) and would love your support:

  • simplify managing focus
  • simplify basic keyboard interaction (enter, escape, space)
  • implement a DOM based interface to simplify handling WAI-ARIA state attributes (along the lines of IBM-Watson/a11y.js)
    • easily creating unique-IDs for linking elements e.g. <label for="uniq-123">…</label><input id="uniq-123">
    • toggling states
    • easy support for multiple-id-values, e.g. aria-labeledby="id-1 id-2 id-3" possibly via DOMTokenList, e.g. via tokenlist
  • implement a keyboard command abstraction that maps the keyboard interactions suggested by WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices (e.g. Listbox) to Indie UI Event Triggers
  • implement the corresponding Indie UI Event Actions against DOM elements depending on their role="…" attribute

For the time being, ally.js is developed alongside my actual work projects, and features get added to ally.js once they become necessary to me. Of course you're welcome to contribute whatever and however you can. I don't bite, promise.