Accessibility in Flutter on the Web

Sakshi Rai

28 June 2024

Accessibility is a crucial aspect of web development, ensuring that websites and web applications are usable by people with users.

An accessibility tree is like a map of accessibility features that assistive technology uses to understand and interact with elements on a webpage or application.

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Assistive technology can access and utilize attributes and properties within a structured tree representing various parts of the interface, enhancing accessibility for users with disabilities.

Introduction:-

Flutter, a popular cross-platform framework, has made significant strides in providing accessibility features for web applications.

By implementing accessibility in Flutter on the Web, developers can create inclusive and user-friendly experiences for all users, regardless of their abilities.

Developers can utilize Flutter’s accessibility features to create applications that are perceivable, operable, and understandable.

Opt-In Accessibility:-

Flutter chooses to have accessibility opt-in by default for performance reasons.

Although the team intends to enable semantics by default in Flutter Web in the future, optimizing performance before making the switch is currently a priority.

Developers who want consistent access to their Flutter applications can easily do so with direct code snippets.

import 'package:flutter/foundation.dart';
import 'package:flutter/semantics.dart';

void main() {
  runApp(const MyApp());
  if (kIsWeb) {
    SemanticsBinding.instance.ensureSemantics();
  }
}

import 'package:flutter/foundation.dart';

import 'package:flutter/semantics.dart';

void main() {

runApp(const MyApp());

if (kIsWeb) {

SemanticsBinding.instance.ensureSemantics();

}

Note: If your app requires to know if a user is using accessibility devices like screen readers, allow users to opt-in.

Before opt-in:

After opt-in:

Implementation:-

In Flutter, the fundamental concept is to generate a DOM structure that is accessible and accurately mirrors the current content displayed on the canvas.

This consists of a parent custom element that has child elements that can be scrolled. Consider a list widget, such as Listview. This widget is represented by an element in the DOM.

The ARIA annotations and other DOM properties on the element allow the screen reader to announce the element as a listview to the user, and support scroll on it.

Output:-

Accessibility in Flutter on the Web

An accessibility tree is like a map of accessibility features that assistive technology uses to understand and interact with elements on a webpage or application.