Turbolinks is an accessibility nightmare

[jmuheim]

Turbolinks prevents Screen Readers from being notified when the page Content is replaced. Also, the page title is not automatically announced (which is done right after every page reload).

What can be done about this issue? I'm surprised that I seem to be the first one complaining about this.

[sidnc86]

Hey Joshua, Thanks for bringing this issue up. We'll take this up. Currently, we are working on enabling accessibility for link_to called with remote:true. We can think about turbolinks in parallel and come up with a override through WAIAble.

[jmuheim]

I'm happy to join your development. I'm working for a swiss accessibility consulting foundation (Zugang für alle / Access for all), and we're in the process of starting the development of an internal web application to speed up our workflows using Rails. And this app will have to be 100% accessible, as many of our employees have disabilities themselves.

[jmuheim]

I have also added a similar question on StackOverflow:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28282264/optimise-turbolinks-for-screen-readers

[sidnc86]

AhNice to know that you would like to be a part of our development activity! Looked at your StackOverflow post as well. In fact, to be frank, I had heard about Pjax before but I wasn't aware of TurboLinks. It is your issue here that has made us broaden our scope while we think about issue#23

[jmuheim]

Just for the records, if anyone stumbles over this in search for a quick fix: simply deactivate turbolinks! Remove gem 'turbolinks' from the Gemfile.

[nitinzd]

Hi Joshua,

I think there is no need to remove Turbolinks. Though I don't have much experience about Turbolinks, it seem to be like AJAX. Here developer needs to take care of the change and should alert to screen readers. In case of Turbo links, the ARIA
Alert
role can be used.

From: Joshua Muheim
Sent: Wednesday, February 04, 2015 8:21 PM
To: techvision/waiable
Subject: Re: [waiable] Turbolinks is an accessibility nightmare (#22)

Just for the records, if anyone stumbles over this in search for a quick fix: simply deactivate turbolinks! Remove gem 'turbolinks' from the Gemfile.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[nitinzd]

I think Git has sanitize the message and removed links. Anyway, the correct link for an Alert role is
http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/roles#alert