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## The basics - [x] I [validated my changes](https://developers.google.com/blockly/guides/contribute/core#making_and_verifying_a_change) ## The details ### Resolves Fixes #9304 ### Proposed Changes Fixes non-visual parent roles and rendered connection navigation policy. ### Reason for Changes Other PRs have made progress on removing extraneous accessibility nodes with #9446 being essentially the last of these. Ensuring that parent/child relationships are correct is the last step in ensuring that the entirety of the accessibility node graph is correctly representing the DOM and navigational structure of Blockly. This can have implications and (ideally) improvements for certain screen reader modes that provide higher-level summarization and sometimes navigation (bypassing Blockly's keyboard navigation) since it avoids an incorrect flat node structure and instead ensures correct hierarchy and ordering. It was discovered during the development of the PR that setting `aria-owns` properties to ensure that all focusable accessibility nodes have the correct parent/child relationships (particularly for blocks) isn't actually viable per the analysis summarized in this comment: https://github.com/RaspberryPiFoundation/blockly/pull/9449#issuecomment-3663234767. At a high level introducing these relationships seems to actually cause problems in both ChromeVox and Voiceover. Part of the analysis discovered that nodes set with the `presentation` role aren't going to behave correctly due to the spec ignoring that role if any children of such elements are focusable, so this PR does change those over to `generic` which is more correct. They are still missing in Chrome's accessibility node viewer, and `generic` _seems_ to introduce slightly better `group` behaviors on VoiceOver (that is, it seems to reduce some of the `group` announcements which VoiceOver is known for over-specifying). Note that some tests needed to be updated to ensure that they were properly rendering blocks (in order for `RenderedConnection.canBeFocused()` to behave correctly) in the original implementation of the PR. Only one test actually changed in behavior because it seemed like it was incorrect before--the particular connection being tested wasn't actually navigable and the change to `canBeFocused` actually enforces that. These changes were kept even though the behaviors weren't needed anymore since it's still a bit more correct than before. Overall, #9304 is closed here because the tree seems to be about as good as it can get with current knowledge (assuming no other invalid roles need to be fixed, but that can be addressed in separate issues as needed). ### Test Coverage No automated tests are needed for this since it's experimental but it has been manually tested with both ChromeVox and Voiceover. ### Documentation No documentation changes are needed for these experimental changes. ### Additional Information Note that there are some limitations with this approach: text editors and listboxes (e.g. for comboboxes) are generally outside of the hierarchy represented by the Blockly workspace. This is an existing issue that remains unaffected by these changes, and fixing it to be both ARIA compliant and consistent with the DOM may not be possible (though it doesn't seem like there's a strong requirement to maintain DOM and accessibility node tree hierarchical relationships). The analysis linked above also considered introducing a top-level `application` role which might change some of the automated behaviors of certain roles but this only seemed to worsen local testing with ChromeVox so it was excluded.
Blockly
Google's Blockly is a library that adds a visual code editor to web and mobile apps. The Blockly editor uses interlocking, graphical blocks to represent code concepts like variables, logical expressions, loops, and more. It allows users to apply programming principles without having to worry about syntax or the intimidation of a blinking cursor on the command line. All code is free and open source.
Getting Started with Blockly
Blockly has many resources for learning how to use the library. Start at our Google Developers Site to read the documentation on how to get started, configure Blockly, and integrate it into your application. The developers site also contains links to:
Help us focus our development efforts by telling us what you are doing with Blockly. The questionnaire only takes a few minutes and will help us better support the Blockly community.
Installing Blockly
Blockly is available on npm:
npm install blockly
For more information on installing and using Blockly, see the Getting Started article.
Getting Help
- Report a bug or file a feature request on GitHub
- Ask a question, or search others' questions, on our developer forum. You can also drop by to say hello and show us your prototypes; collectively we have a lot of experience and can offer hints which will save you time. We actively monitor the forums and typically respond to questions within 2 working days.
blockly-samples
We have a number of resources such as examples, codelabs, and plugins in another repository called blockly-samples. A plugin is a self-contained piece of code that adds functionality to Blockly. Plugins can add fields, define themes, create renderers, and much more. For more information, see the Plugins documentation.
Contributing to Blockly
Want to make Blockly better? We welcome contributions to Blockly in the form of pull requests, bug reports, documentation, answers on the forum, and more! Check out our Contributing Guidelines for more information. You might also want to look for issues tagged "Help Wanted" which are issues we think would be great for external contributors to help with.
Releases
We release by pushing the latest code to the master branch, followed by updating the npm package, our docs, and demo pages. If there are breaking bugs, such as a crash when performing a standard action or a rendering issue that makes Blockly unusable, we will cherry-pick fixes to master between releases to fix them. The releases page has a list of all releases.
We use semantic versioning. Releases that have breaking changes or are otherwise not backwards compatible will have a new major version. Patch versions are reserved for bug-fix patches between scheduled releases.
We now have a beta release on npm. If you'd like to test the upcoming release, or try out a not-yet-released new API, you can use the beta channel with:
npm install blockly@beta
As it is a beta channel, it may be less stable, and the APIs there are subject to change.
Branches
There are two main branches for Blockly.
master - This is the (mostly) stable current release of Blockly.
develop - This is where most of our work happens. Pull requests should always be made against develop. This branch will generally be usable, but may be less stable than the master branch. Once something is in develop we expect it to merge to master in the next release.
other branches: - Larger changes may have their own branches until they are good enough for people to try out. These will be developed separately until we think they are almost ready for release. These branches typically get merged into develop immediately after a release to allow extra time for testing.
New APIs
Once a new API is merged into master it is considered beta until the following release. We generally try to avoid changing an API after it has been merged to master, but sometimes we need to make changes after seeing how an API is used. If an API has been around for at least two releases we'll do our best to avoid breaking it.
Unreleased APIs may change radically. Anything that is in develop but not master is subject to change without warning.
Issues and Milestones
We typically triage all bugs within 1 week, which includes adding any appropriate labels and assigning it to a milestone. Please keep in mind, we are a small team so even feature requests that everyone agrees on may not be prioritized.
Good to Know
- Cross-browser Testing Platform and Open Source <3 Provided by Sauce Labs
- We test browsers using BrowserStack