Perhaps not surprisingly, the first feature Microsoft has committed to adding to Chromium is for accessibility.
News of this “intent to implement,” as a Microsoft engineer calls it, comes via the Chromium forums; thanks to Sam for pointing this out to me via email. The feature is called UI Automation Providers, and it will allow Chromium-based browsers on Windows to seamlessly interact with accessibility client applications like Narrator.
“These interfaces are specific to the Windows platform and [are] not intended to be introduced as web standards,” Microsoft’s Rossen Atanassov explains. “It is not expected that web developers will need to make changes to their content as a result of this work, as UIAutomation support reflects lower-level implementation details, and will not be replacing or removing accessibility APIs already supported in Chromium.”
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According to Microsoft, adding UI Automation Providers support to Chromium will allow assistive technology (AT) providers to “innovate on top of rich text-level interaction and smooth reading experiences; spend less time writing to different accessibility APIs, and more time on core capabilities; and take advantage of a continually-evolving platform, and the performance gains and extended capabilities that come along with it.”
Best of all, there are no perceived risks to this addition: UI Automation Providers support will not degrade browser performance at all, and it will not impact web developers at all, either.
The only issue, I guess, is that UI Automation Providers requires Windows 7 or newer. It will not work with Mac, Linux, Chrome OS, or Android.
Microsoft will now document what it’s adding to Chromium via a new Microsoft Edge Explainers repository on GitHub. So this will be a good place to keep an eye to see what else the firm has planned for the new Edge browser.
dontbe evil
<blockquote><em><a href="#380426">In reply to Pungkuss:</a></em></blockquote><p>this should be available in all future versions of edge on all platforms</p>