Enhancing The Developer and End-User Experience on ChromeVox

Google Tech Talk August 7, 2012 Presented by Cagri Yildirim, Adu Bhandaru, Sergiu Toarca, and T.V. Raman ABSTRACT ChromeVox is a Chrome extension that augments Chrome with complete spoken feedback for a blind user. In addition to providing out-of-the-box accessibility on Chrome OS, Chrome Vox is being used by engineering teams across Google to test accessibility. This summer, Serge, Cagriy and Adu have worked on significantly enhancing the ChromeVox developer experience as outlined below. Serge: Refactor Code For Better Health Serge has extensively refactored the ChromeVox codebase --- this has set us up to evolve ChromeVox rapidly this coming year. In the process, he has also eliminated many performance issues in ChromeVox. Adu: Better Focus Management A commonly occuring accessibility problem within complex Google Web Apps is the failure to consistently set focus --- especially when switching among tasks in a complex workflow. Thus, when a Web application presents a confirmation dialog in response to a user action, exiting that dialog often fails to restore focus; this type of failure can leave a blind user "lost in space". While we continue to educate engineers across Google to manage focus consistently, Adu devised a solution within ChromeVox to restore focus when possible --- this has a significant impact on the overall usability of complex Web Apps when using ChromeVox. Cagriy: Leveraging The ChromeVox Platform In addition to adding spoken output to Chrome, ChromeVox exposes a small set of APIs that are leveraged at present by Google Apps to provide accessibility within Google Docs. These APIs enable devlopers go beyond what can be achieved with pure markup-based solutions --- this summer, Cagriy has worked on exposing these APIs to Web developers via a light-weight extension framework. With his work, Web developers can easily create Chrome extensions that leverage the ChromeVox APIs that enhance the overall usability of Web Apps. ChromeVox exposes a small set of APIs for use from within web Applications --- this has been used until now by Google Docs and friends to enhance the accessibility of Google Apps.