Hey there, thanks for your reply. I tried the following:
1. clicked on trainning. clicked on start, to start solving a puzzle.
I got to know the strings:
Black to play.
a list, from a to h, and 1 to 8, twice.
They are the board co-ordinates shown around the board - repeated because they are shown both top and bottom and left and right.
A string suggesting to flip the board, and some other buttons like move or analyze in a separate line.
In the very end of the page, a move was described:
1. fxe4
That is the "pre-move" , i.e. the last move made by your opponent before the tactic starts (and often the move which actually creates the tactical possibility for you), if you have the FEN of the position after that move, you don't necessarily need it, but without it you are missing are clue that other solvers receive.
and maybe the reference number to the problem: Problem Set: Standard ( 28852 in set)
I could not unfortunately find the fen in the alt text, but setting the alt text is normally enough. I could imagine that the element is not discover able with screen readers, and that's why we could not find it.
I've made a change that makes the board an entity that can be tabbed to, I've also added a tag that tells screen readers that the board container is holding a 'grid' (the closest role I could find for a chess board in the official list of UI roles from the accessibility standards). I'm not sure if this will help, but in the Apple screen reader I was able to get focus on the board, which I wasn't before and clicking on the in focus board read the FEN string. Obviously clicking isn't an option here, but I would have thought there is an equivalent key combination that screen readers can use to do the same thing as clicking when focussed on an element on the page which might read the FEN string for you.
Unfortunately I'm doing most of my work on a Mac, but I have been playing around with 'voiceover' the built in apple screen reader since reading your post and to test a few changes.
http://webaim.org- very good resource on the web to understand with practical examples how to implement something accessible.
I am still thinking the best way to make chess accessible on a web page. For the puzzles, I was considering writing a parser in python from fen notation to something that I described above (listing the white pieces and then the black pieces, so I can setup them on my board by my side). this is what my friends are doing to help me at this moment, and it worked so far..
If you can provide and example page from another site that has a board with FEN encoding that is easily readable by your screen reader I can try and work out what they are doing to get the accessibility working, and try to do the same with the board here.
concerning entering moves with a keystroke
, please have in mind that most of the screen readers are modal. this means that they work in two modes:
Reading or browse mode and focus mode. In browse mode, imagine that it creates a buffer with the current page, where commands that you give to it will be interpreted by the screen reader and not by the page. this is very useful, for example, to navigate quickly in pages that we already know. In google, for example, I use the h key to jump between html headers on the page, which are the search results. focus mode is a special mode used only in application-like websites, like gmail, docs, youtube, where you want every key that you press to be interpreted by the page and not by the screen reader. Long story short, another approach to this would be to create an invisible field to input the moves, that only screen readers could find. This is easily doable, examples included in the link mentioned above.
Yes, that might be the easiest solution, but probably best to try to solve the board encoding situation first, as obviously without that the ability to enter moves with the keyboard is probably pointless.
Regards,
Richard.
