The accessible SVG line graphs post explains how to use ARIA table semantics to make that form of data visualisation accessible to screen readers. This article uses the same ARIA based approach to make a screen reader accessible SVG flowchart.
The Accessibility Object Model (AOM) is an experimental JavaScript API that enables developers to modify the browser accessibility tree. The AOM has four phases, and support for phase one recently landed in Chrome Canary behind the flag.
SVG is often used for data visualisation, but because SVG lacks the semantics to express structures like bar charts, line graphs, and scatter plots, the content is difficult for screen reader users to interpret. The solution is to use the technique for creating accessible SVG tables as your starting point.
SVG has no native semantics for representing structures like tables, but ARIA1.1 introduces a number of roles that can be used to polyfill the necessary semantic information.
ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) is a suite of specifications from the W3C. Knowing which specification has the information you need isn’t always obvious, so this post briefly introduces each specification and where it fits into the overall ARIA landscape.
It is common on the web for the current thing in a collection to be highlighted visually, but providing an alternative for screen reader users has often involved something of a hack. The aria-current attribute is intended to solve this problem.