Canvas Uses and Techniques for WCAG

Presentation

Decorative use, image asset generation

Decorative use includes asset generation. Gradients and the like. This is a good place to start, "decorative use" is defined in WCAG. Typically, when procedurally generating such graphics, what we will do is use toDataURL and push them into an image or CSS. It's the Canvas context that's most likely to be used here. It's often the case that we won't even put the canvas element into the DOM.

Decorative use, no information is communicated, paint server

WebKit introduced a CSS Canvas context for these kinds of cases, to be deprecated eventually by the element() css selector.

Basic media

Procedural demos

They are intended solely for developers: coding experiments, sometimes interactive.

  • http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/ParticleAcceleration/
  • http://js1k.com/2012-love/demos

    Video demos

    Many simple video demonstrations of Canvas are available showing manual blending of a video feed with Canvas pixel data.

    Basic charts

    It's been possible via server-side generated images to generate charts for some time; such charts should always have image maps or otherwise convey alternate navigation interfaces. Failing to do so is only appropriate for charts that are for decorative use or otherwise solely exist to visually augment data presented to the user in text and accessible via the DOM.

    Drawing a scatterplot or other graph without associating the labels in the DOM is a failure of accessibility.

    Basic media implementations

    These are real libraries meant for actual consumption. These do not truly fit in the concept of "decorative" use. They are content-based. They may or may not have associated form elements. Implementations may also include SVG filter chians. They ought to have some interactivity, in some cases, such as displaying loading error information, or a pause button if animated. However, instances of these items may span from the most basic category of presentation or decorative use to more advanced categories of basic and component elements.

    User interfaces

    With an interactive Canvas, the author should be using the DOM to convey UI information. The Canvas will be present in the DOM, it should have title, id and/or ARIA information. Title is not particularly reliable, and so it's highly recommended that ARIA is used as well as semantic HTML.

    Basic Elements

    Gradient pickers are the most common place to encounter simple controls. Essentially, implementations of input @type="color" as well as combinations (for gradients). input @type="range" is another common one to encounter.

    Composite Elements

    Implementations of elements with multiple control types, such as a select button, a set of radio buttons or other collection of form elements.

    Complex multimedia implementations

    These implementations are often based on existing formats, such as PDF, SVG or HTML4 Forms.

    Ink Surfaces

    Using input from a pointer device or other CAD technique, these provide a full surface for rendering and editing. Vector editors and other spatially oriented components.

    Raw paint surface

    This is most frequently used for emulators and cross-compiled applications. There are gameboy emulators for instance. There are implementations of Java that run in JavaScript. There are implementations of Flash. There is an implementation of LLVM. There are VNC implementations.

    These are similar to item 2c. Complex multimedia implementations.

    The distinction, though, is that the author is likely to be using proxy methods, implementing a pre-existing 2d graphics API atop Canvas. They may, for instance, implement flash.display.* or Windows.Drawing. With something like VNC, they may be implementing an accessibility tree atop the VNC protocol.

    Work with LLVM has demonstrated that old applications not built for the browser can be run in the browser. Google has the PNaCl project, running those applications in native code. Mozilla has the Emscripten route, running the native code in the JS virtual machine. Authors have repeatedly and successfully used Emscripten with Canvas to run old applications in the browser without plugins.

    Canvas Techniques

    NOTE: CSS3 is a mixed bag. Vendor prefixes are necessary.

    "CSS3 won't even be fully standardised until 2008 if things carry on as they are, I wouldn't count on widespread support any time soon, unfortunately." Ben Basson - December 23rd, 2005

    Canvas Usage Tests and Examples

    These examples are designed for browsers which have implemented Canvas accessibility hooks. They contain some fallback code, but for brevity, do not contain the full mechanisms listed in Canvas Techniques.