a11y-announcer

A11y-announcer

This addon is to allow for accessible route changes inside of your ember application. Currently when you change a route in ember nothing alerts a screen reader that the route has changed. This is very bad and screen reader users hear nothing but silence.

The goal for this addon is to fill the gaps in embers router. Thank you to @patrickfox for the idea!

How does it work?

The basic idea of this addon is to announce the new page title on every route change. This means the page title needs to change on every route. If it's routable, it's different enough to warrant a title change.

I use ember-cli-document-title to help me with manging the title of each route.

Getting Started

• ember install a11y-announcer
• Add {{route-announcer}} to your application.hbs file.

Pushing updates to the announcer

Sometimes you want to push an announcement of some sort to the announcer. To do that you need to inject the announcer service:

export default Ember.Controller.extend({
  announcer: Ember.inject.service('announcer')
})

Now that the service has been injected you can call the announce method: this.get('announcer').announce('Your Message', 'polite');

It takes two arguments. The first argument is the message that you want to be read off by the screen reader. The second argument is how aggressively the message will be read off. There are three different strings you can pass here:

• off which means nothing will be read
• polite which will not interrupt the screen reader
• assertive which will immediately interrupt the screen reader

Changing the route change message

To change the route has changes message from ${pageTitle} has loaded to something custom (for example ${pageTitle} has finished loading) you will need to edit your Router in router.js:

var Router = Ember.Router.extend({
  location: config.locationType
  announcer: Ember.inject.service('announcer'),

  init() {
    this.super(...arguments);

    this.set('announcer.message', 'has finished loading');
  }
});

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Installation

• git clone this repository
• npm install or yarn

Linting

• ember server
• Visit your app at http://localhost:4200.

Running tests

• ember test
• ember test --server

Running the dummy application

• ember serve
• Visit the dummy application at http://localhost:4200.

For more information on using ember-cli, visit http://www.ember-cli.com/.