Accessibility/Skywriter

ACE Editor Accessibility Review

(MarcoZ and davidb)

There is no good DOM relationship between a line number and the line of source code it labels. The section containing all line numbers is encountered first, before finding the actual source code.
The (off-screen) textarea is what screen reader users encounter when attempting to edit the source code, and currently has nothing connecting it to the actual visible (source code) text. The textarea has no content.
With each caret flash on/off we fire a reorder event which would confuse screen reader software.

We could connect the line numbers to the line of source via WAI-ARIA.
We could possibly use aria-owns and/or aria-activedescendant to make the editing or source code more accessible but Marco points out that aria-activedescendant requires a parent-child DOM relationship between the textarea and the section containing the source code. Apart from the reorder event problem with the visible caret, we also need to expose caret offsets, and this latter issue is a similar problem we have with canvas.