Microsoft improves accessibility features for Chromium

Microsoft has become increasingly active in customising the Chromium web rendering engine for use on Windows.  Their latest contributions improve the accessibility features of the chromium rendering engine, and also brings a number of other improvements, which brings the engine closer to the old EdgeHTML rendering engine.

See a list of the latest improvements below.

New PDF Features

Currently, accessibility support on PDF is limited to reading text, so users can’t read and invoke links on PDF.

Microsoft has proposed a change that will allow PDF accessibility to send data for links and images, in a new commit.  The data will also be populated in the structures for links and images.

This change modifies the existing PDF interfaces to send data for links and images. This extends the existing pipeline to accommodate links and images which is part of the larger effort to make links and images accessible in PDF.

Microsoft described how this feature will be implemented in Chromium:

• Setting up inline reading order for links and images along with text.
• Identifying links and passing link information to the AxTree in the browser process.
• Passing invoke actions on links down to the plugin process.
• Identifying images and passing image information to the AxTree in the browser process.
• Providing alternate text for images for the ones where it is present.
• Implement scrolling of text and controls to take care of scroll alignment.

New Colour Picker

Microsoft updated their colour picker on both Edge and Chrome Canary last month, to a new, modern one.

Previously, the colour picker only supported the HEX and RGB colour formats; but in a new feature, users can now view and manually change a selected colour in the HSL colour format.

You can switch between the HEX, RGB and HSL by clicking on the format toggler.

The HSL colour format is currently only available on Edge- Chrome Canary’s colour picker is still limited to the HEX and RGB colour formats for now.

High contrast mode improvements for web publishers

Microsoft is adding support for LinkText and VisitedText system colour keywords, to allow web publishers to customise their sites with relevant link colours when high contrast mode has been enabled in Windows.

OpenXR Gamepad support is also coming to Chromium on Windows.  Microsoft says developers can test the feature by installing a Mixed Reality OpenXR Developer Preview app from the Microsoft Store and building a customised build of Chromium.

Source: Windowslatest