Accessibility in Etherpad – a11n

Today we’re proud to announce that Etherpad is now accessibility enabled.

TLDR;

Screen readers are fully supported

Keyboard shortcuts are now available for the pad and timeslider pages

Various new fonts available in core (only changes viewers experience)

High contrast user experience now available (see ep_themes plugin)

Control Shift 2 shows author information pop-up for currently selected line

Quick links

Accessibility and keyboard shortcut documentation

The pull request with a plethora of comments and thoughts

A testing environment to play around with

Special thanks to

Our sponsor: TBA
pvagner for all his input and testing..
W3 for their work on ARIA

Some quick win shortcuts you should know about

Alt F9 brings up the context menu, Alt F9 and Escape returns focus back to the pad.
Alt C brings up chat
Arrow keys navigate most things

I spotted something that’s wrong or I think it can be made better, how can I tell you?

Either create an issue on github and/or use our idea informer which doesn’t require any sign up or registration to post :)

When will see accessibility land in a major release?

We’re hours away from starting our 2015 hackathon which should bare the fruits of a major release so hopefully a major release will land within 48 hours of this blog post however if you are itching to get your mitts on Accessibility features simply checkout the Etherpad develop branch.