Accessible SVG Community Group

Accessible SVG Community Group
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Accessible SVG Community Group
Accessible SVG Community Group
This group was closed on 2023-04-07.
Scalable Vector Graphics offers both opportunities and challenges for accessibility. This group will explore the different conditions and circumstances for SVG use, propose clear use cases and requirements and specification text, and make tests so we can have consistent behavior in various user agents (including different screen readers).
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Accessible SVG Roadmap v1.0
Doug Schepers
Posted on:
August 15, 2013
SVG, as a text format for graphics, already has a lot of potential for accessibility. It’s not just that SVG can be made accessible, it’s that SVG can be much more accessible than other graphics formats, with very little extra effort on the part of developers and designers.
Chaals McCathie-Nevile
(Yandex), my co-chair for this community group, wrote the “
Accessibility Features of SVG
” specification many years ago with some great tips for basic accessibility and some mapping between SVG 1.0 and WCAG 1.0. That document defines authoring and content requirements, rather than requirements on
user agents
(browsers and screen readers).
To specify requirements on user agents, we will look to SVG2 and related modules.
Rich Schwerdtfeger
(IBM) has been working hard in the SVG Working Group on porting existing ARIA attributes and some HTML5 accessibility features into SVG 2.  We also have plans for adding even more accessibility requirements directly into SVG. (I have some pretty fancy ideas for this myself.)
But I think there’s some useful work to be done even before the spec work. I’m going to propose a roadmap for us here.
Step 1: Identifying shortcomings
Right now, although SVG support is very good in browsers, they’ve mostly paid attention to the visual and scripting aspects, and not necessarily the accessibility aspects. Part of that is due to a lack of clear requirements, and clear tests. I have faith that if we give browsers and screen readers this clear direction, they will be eager to rise to that goal. So, we need to imagine the various scenarios for SVG usage, and how that can improve or harm accessibility, and write tests to cover those use-cases. As a starter:
is the