Windows 10: Making web more accessible and inclusive for all with Microsoft Edge

Brink · May 21, 2020

The past few months have forever changed the way we work, learn and play each day. Our routines have been entirely disrupted, and weâve had to adapt to new ways to stay productive, entertained and healthy. This change in our global landscape has increased our dependency on technology and highlights the importance of digital accessibility and inclusion â core to how we build products at Microsoft.

Microsoft Edge is committed to building a more accessible web for everyone. A little over a year ago, we announced our intention to rebuild Microsoft Edge with the same open source technology as Google Chrome. Since then, weâve committed over 150 changes on accessibility features alone back into the open source project with the support of the Google Chrome team. Weâre proud to share this work and to continue building features that will benefit everyone.

We have continued to be inspired as we hear stories like https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=NDnUWKkYPrI&feature=emb_logo. Emmy is a fifth grader from Fairfax County Public Schools, who not only uses Immersive Reader herself but has also become an advocate for the tool by leading a tech chat for her teachers and helping her classmates. Immersive Reader in Microsoft Edge truly empowers people to achieve more and today we are excited to highlight some of our new and existing features in Edge.

New â Open Immersive Reader across the web

Immersive Reader in Microsoft Edge is helpful for anyone who is looking to improve their experience reading online. You may recognize Immersive Reader across other Microsoft Products like OneNote and Word, and we took our lessons from these experiences to bring this important feature to Edge.

Until recently, the primary ways to access Immersive Reader in Microsoft Edge have been to click the icon in the address bar or to use our F9 shortcut on certain sites. Now, you can simply select content on a web page, right click, and choose âOpen in Immersive Reader.â All three of these options will allow you to easily remove distractions and access a variety of tools that allow for personalization.

New â View visual definitions of words with Picture Dictionary in Microsoft Edge

One of our newest tools in this set will be Picture Dictionary which will help you view a picture representation of a word on a web page to increase comprehension. Ideal for those learning another language or for students learning on their own, it will allow you to stay in the flow of what you are reading. Youâll be able to simply select the word on a web page and see a picture that represents the word. You will be able to turn Picture Dictionary on by navigating to Reading Preferences and using the toggle.

Picture Dictionary in Microsoft Edge is coming to preview builds soon.

New â Translate full web pages into 54 languages within Immersive Reader in Microsoft Edge

The web is packed with important information and many prefer to read pages in their native language. Translate in Microsoft Edge breaks down the walls of language by giving people the ability to easily translate web page text into one of 54 languages with the press of a button. This is ideal for students and professionals who are researching sources across the web and want to make the most of their time. To get started, navigate to the reading preferences in Immersive Reader, select your language of choice, and see the words change instantly to your preferred language.

Translate in Immersive Reader in Microsoft Edge is available in preview builds today.

Hear the web with Read aloud in Microsoft Edge

Already in Microsoft Edge, Read aloud translates words on a web page into spoken text so you can absorb information in multiple ways. Anyone can benefit from using Read aloud to simplify their lives and listen to website content without being tethered to a screen. With Read aloud, you can hear the text read aloud to you and words are highlighted as you go so that you can easily follow along to aid comprehension. We currently have 25 voice options to choose from based on your preference for voice in 13 languages and 21 locales, with our most natural sounding voices yet.

Read aloud is now generally available in desktop and mobile, and works on and offline. Read aloud for PDF is available in preview builds today.

Celebrate our community with our featured Bing homepage image

Beyond offering inclusive tools for web accessibility, Microsoft also highlights key contributors to this space. On Global Accessibility Awareness Day, on the Bing homepage, we are showcasing a painting by Jeff Hanson, an award-winning artist. Hanson is legally blind and only vaguely sees shapes and colors and has developed a unique tactile process that helps him feel his compositions by first plastering the canvas with a thick plastic material. Once that hardens, he uses the defined ridges to navigate the piece to apply his signature vibrant color. Today weâre featuring Hansonâs painting to observe the ongoing work to make technology accessible for more people around the world. Please visit Bing.com on May 21 to take a closer look at Hansonâs painting, plus listen to a short audio clip of the artist talking about his work. If youâre reading this after May 21, you can see the image here. Check out more of his paintings at JeffHansonArt.com.

The web is for everyone, and we are committed to building more inclusive experiences in Microsoft Edge in the coming year. As a company our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more â and this is something we care deeply about. If you havenât yet downloaded the new Microsoft Edge, please try it today. You can also read more about how students from Newmark Schools are using accessibility tools while learning from home in our Education blog. For other tips on how to make the most out of accessibility features across Microsoft products, please visit our remote learning resource site.

We look forward to sharing whatâs next.
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Source: https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexp...icrosoft-edge/

Latest Microsoft Edge released for Windows

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Brink · May 21, 2020

Accessibility: More inclusive web with Microsoft Edge and Windows 10

Microsoft is committed to accessibility as a core part of software design, and today we would like to share more about how Microsoft Edge is evolving to improve support for assistive technology beyond what was possible in Internet Explorer.

Inclusive development is a journey, not merely a destination, and we are committed to continuing to evolve Microsoft Edge to be the best place for accessible browsing on Windows. We’ve made a major step forward with architectural changes in Microsoft Edge, some of which regress experiences compared to Internet Explorer in the short term, but which are in the interest of creating a more inclusive experience for everyone in the long term. This post outlines our journey to a more accessible web experience, including changes in Microsoft Edge available today and recommendations for Windows 10 users who rely on third-party assistive technology software.

Our journey to a more accessible web experience

Windows has used the Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA) API since Windows 98 to express buttons, menus, text, and other on-screen content to assistive technology. Assistive technology vendors have used the MSAA API (along with other app-specific APIs like the DOM in IE, the Office Object Model in Office, and even scraping video drivers) to make text and interfaces more accessible. These techniques have the disadvantage of varying wildly between different applications and documents, which leads to a fragmented and unreliable experience. As user interfaces, documents, and the web significantly increased in complexity, Microsoft introduced the more modern UI Automation (UIA) API in Windows Vista as the successor to MSAA.

UIA was designed to expose more information about the user interface and structured documents, improve performance, and be portable across platforms. Because UIA replaces a variety of potentially unreliable and non-interoperable techniques with a single API, it reduces software complexity, allows developers to express novel UI concepts more easily, and improves stability and user experience consistency between web and native apps, across all types of assistive technology.

Though UIA superseded in MSAA in 2005, Internet Explorer continued to rely on MSAA, using a ‘bridge’ to convert between MSAA and UIA. Relying on this bridge introduced bugs and performance problems in Internet Explorer, and for years it has been a goal of the browser team to move to a native UIA implementation.

Accessibility investments in Microsoft Edge

In Microsoft Edge, we are thrilled to finally have the opportunity to make the transition from MSAA to UIA, alongside enormous complementary investments in rearchitecting our DOM implementation and rewriting the browser interface from scratch. The change to UIA is our largest investment in browser accessibility ever, and it lays the foundation for a more inclusive web experience for users who depend on assistive technology in Windows 10. Because EdgeHTML is used throughout Windows 10 (inside Universal Windows Apps, in Cortana, etc.), these benefits will have an impact beyond the browser. Users will also benefit from the evergreen nature of the EdgeHTML engine.

You can see many of the improvements in action today using Narrator, which is built into Windows 10. We’re using Narrator to vet UIA as we simultaneously work with third party assistive technology providers to transition in the near future. For example, while MSAA supports only basic UI constructs, Narrator works with UIA in Microsoft Edge to express more complex roles, states, and properties to better represent structured and interactive documents.

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Using Narrator in Microsoft Edge exposes a set of new accessibility features, including:

ARIA roles: none, article, definition, log, math, note, scrollbar, application, banner, complementary, contentinfo, form, main, navigation, search

ARIA properties: aria-atomic, aria-autocomplete, aria-dropeffect, aria-grabbed, aria-label, aria-multiline, aria-orientation, aria-sort, aria-valuetext

HTML headings (<h1> to <h6>) are exposed via role and property

Indeterminate HTML checkbox

Narrator table and list reading improvements

UIA implementation in HTML5 form elements

The Microsoft Edge team continues to work with the W3C and other browser vendors on an ongoing basis to ensure that new web platform features have sufficient built-in accessibility. For example, Internet Explorer was one of the first browsers to support the <track> element and WebVTT caption format for video captioning. The work we shipped in Windows 10 gives us a foundation to release future features more quickly, as part of our commitment to making EdgeHTML an evergreen platform.

Getting to good: Our backlog

We recognize Microsoft Edge isn’t where it needs to be to provide a fully accessible browsing experience. Building a new browser required new user experience work in all levels of the product, including accessibility. Windows Insiders and others in the accessibility community have provided valuable feedback which we’re using to prioritize improvements to the accessibility of the browser’s controls and the web itself in Microsoft Edge that will be available in the coming months. These include:

Better keyboarding and narrator support in major UI elements such as the address bar, settings, favorites, history, and downloads

Support for semantically tagged PDFs for paragraphs, links, and images including alternative text specified for links and images. PDF improvements also include better keyboarding for links within a document.

Improved Flash accessibility

Improved ARIA and HTML mapping to UIA

We’re also working on longer-term investments. The following are high priority items on our backlog:

HTML Semantic Elements and Narrator Landmark Navigation

Accessible Name and Description: Computation and API Mappings 1.1

Improvements to Core Accessibility API Mappings 1.1 (ARIA implementation)

Improvements to HTML Accessibility API Mappings 1.0 (HTML accessibility implementation)

Including text in default Narrator navigation

Improved Tagged PDF support

Finally, we’re working to help enable WebDriver support for automating accessibility API testing.
This list is just the beginning – we will continue to invest in Microsoft Edge and sharing our development roadmap via this blog and our Platform Status page, which we’re updating to reflect the above priorities. We encourage you to share your feedback on our priorities to help us rank our backlog appropriately.

Recommendations for Assistive Technology users on Windows 10

Many assistive technology users rely on third-party screen readers, so we are working closely with the most popular third-party assistive technology vendors to help them transition to UIA to provide a better experience for their users than was possible in Internet Explorer. These conversations are also a valuable feedback channel for us as we evolve UIA to close any remaining gaps with other APIs like MSAA and IAccessible2.

Users who depend on third party assistive technology should read Rob Sinclair’s post, “Windows 10 upgrade considerations for screen reader and magnifier users,” on the Microsoft Accessibility Blog. Some third party assistive technology may not yet be fully compatible with Microsoft Edge; in the short term, we recommend Internet Explorer for the most accessible browsing experience with these tools as our partners complete this transition. As we continue to work with assistive technology providers and evolve UIA in Windows 10, we expect Microsoft Edge to close the gap with Internet Explorer, and third party assistive technologies to begin providing UIA support on par with Narrator in the coming months.

If you encounter issues using assistive technology on Windows 10, you can contact the Microsoft Disability Answer Desk for support, or contact your assistive technology vendor for more information on their Windows 10 and Microsoft Edge support.

As we continue to improve the accessibility of Windows 10, your feedback is crucial. We encourage you to consider joining the Windows Insider Program to share your experiences and suggestions with us.

– Cynthia C. Shelly, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Developer Platform
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Source: Accessibility: Towards a more inclusive web with Microsoft Edge and Windows 10 | Microsoft Edge Dev Blog

Deepika Gowda · May 21, 2020

Unable to access YouTube websites on Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge on Windows 10

Hi,

As you are facing issues with accessing the YouTube on Windows browsers, do not worry we will help you with this issue.

Provide us additional information to assist you better with this issue:

What is the complete error message/ error code while trying to access the web pages?

Does this issue specific only with YouTube?

Have you made any changes to the operating system prior to this issue?

Try the below workarounds to identify what is causing the issue:

Try to access YouTube in different browser and check if it is working fine. This will let us know if the issue is with the website/ the Microsoft browsers.

Also, try to access different website on Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge.

Try the below troubleshooting steps to access the website and check if it helps.

Method 1: For Internet Explorer

Step 1: I suggest you to run the Internet Explorer Performance troubleshooter.

Press Windows key, type
troubleshooting and select it.

Click on View all in the left pane.

Click on Internet Explorer Performance
and follow the onscreen instructions.

Step 2: If the issue is only on Internet Explorer and to specific website, I suggest you to view the website in compatibility view to check if the issue is confined to compatibility.

Steps to view the website in compatibility view:

Open Internet Explorer
and open the website.

Click on Gear/ Settings icon at the right-top corner of the window.

Click on Compatibility View Settings, click on Add
to add the website and click on Close.

Reopen the website and check if the issue persists.

Step 3: If the issue still persists, I suggest you to access the website in
InPrivate mode and check.

InPrivate Browsing enables you to surf the web without leaving a trail in Internet Explorer. This helps prevent anyone else who might be using your computer from seeing what sites you visited and what you looked at on the web. You can start InPrivate
Browsing from the New Tab page or the Safety button.

Steps to open the browser in InPrivate mode:

Open Internet Explorer, press Shift+Ctrl+P
to open the browser in InPrivate mode and try to access the website.

Method 2: For Microsoft Edge:

I suggest you to check if the Adobe Flash player is enabled on Microsoft Edge.

Open Microsoft Edge, click on More actions
(...) in the right-top corner of Microsoft Edge window.

Click on Settings, scroll down and click on
Advanced settings.

Enable Use Adobe Flash Player

Check if the issue persists with accessing the YouTube websites.

Hope it helps. Reply to the post with an updated status to access YouTube website on Microsoft browsers for further

assistance.

Thank you.

Brink · May 21, 2020

Microsoft improving DevTools accessibility in Microsoft Edge

More than ever, web developers are recognizing that the web must be accessible and inclusive in order to create great experiences for everyone. Nearly half of computer users in the US also use some form of assistive technology (AT). Users of AT may have physical or cognitive disabilities, temporary injuries, hearing or vision loss, or other conditions that necessitate different experiences on the web. Other users may not have an impairment but benefit from the convenience of features such as keyboard navigation.

Driven by this knowledge and Microsoft’s commitment to inclusivity and accessibility, our team of developers, designers, and accessibility experts worked together to bring new accessibility features and improvements to the Microsoft Edge Developer Tools.

Engineers from the Microsoft Edge DevTools team

Developers who use DevTools via the keyboard or with screen readers like NVDA and Narrator should find great improvements in navigating between tabs and viewing detailed information within panes. Our accessibility improvements, informed by W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), extend beyond essential tab and pane navigation. Complex features like breakpoints and performance details are now accessible, too.

Navigating the Performance tool with NVDA

In some cases, tools were even reimagined or built from scratch. For example, the new Initiator tab makes stack traces accessible by moving them out of a hover element and into their own tab. The stack traces are now in a format that is more compatible with AT.

The request initiator chain in the Initiator tab

We’ve also improved color contrast ratios in the UI of DevTools and ensured that data charts and other information can be visualized in ways other than by color alone.

These DevTools accessibility features and more are all available in the new Microsoft Edge browser for Windows 10, Mac OS X, and legacy Windows (7/8/8.1). But you’ll also find them in Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers, too! With the support of the Google Chrome team and the Chromium community, we’ve committed over 150 changes back into Chromium on DevTools accessibility features alone. We’re proud to share this accessibility work to help improve the experience for millions of developers on Microsoft Edge and other Chromium-based browsers.

And our work isn’t done—we continue to work toward additional features such as:

Support for high-contrast mode for DevTools,

Tooling to simulate high-contrast on websites being debugged in DevTools, allowing developers on both Windows and Mac platforms to test high-contrast layouts, and

Making sure our DevTools meet the accessibility recommendations outlined in the new WCAG 2.1 standards.

For more information about accessibility in DevTools, refer to our online documentation for navigating Microsoft Edge DevTools with assistive technology.

The stable version of Microsoft Edge featuring these accessibility improvements is available for download. Give it a try and let us know what you think!

– Rachel Simone Weil, Program Manager, Microsoft Edge DevTools
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Source: https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/...accessibility/

Latest Microsoft Edge released for Windows

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Windows 10: Making web more accessible and inclusive for all with Microsoft Edge

Making web more accessible and inclusive for all with Microsoft Edge

Making web more accessible and inclusive for all with Microsoft Edge

Making web more accessible and inclusive for all with Microsoft Edge

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