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Challenges integrating accessibility features in a Python Flask app on Ubuntu 22.04

đź‘€ Views: 477 đź’¬ Answers: 1 đź“… Created: 2025-09-06
Flask accessibility JavaScript Python

I'm working on a personal project and I've been struggling with this for a few days now and could really use some help... In the process of developing a new feature for our web application, I need to enhance accessibility for users with disabilities. We're using Python Flask and deploying on Ubuntu 22.04, and I’ve come across some hurdles while implementing ARIA roles and keyboard navigation enhancements. I attempted to follow the WAI-ARIA guidelines and added roles to our HTML elements, but I’m unsure if they’re being recognized correctly by screen readers. For instance, I have a button that should trigger a modal dialog, and I implemented it like this: ```html <button id="modal-button" aria-haspopup="dialog" aria-controls="modal" aria-label="Open Modal">Open Modal</button> ``` Next, to handle keyboard navigation, I’m using JavaScript to trap focus within the modal, but tests indicate that screen readers don't seem to navigate as expected. Here's a snippet of the code I wrote for focus management: ```javascript const modal = document.getElementById('modal'); const modalButton = document.getElementById('modal-button'); modalButton.addEventListener('click', function() { modal.style.display = 'block'; modal.focus(); }); modal.addEventListener('keydown', function(event) { if (event.key === 'Tab') { // logic to trap focus } }); ``` Additionally, I’ve enabled accessibility features in the browser and tested it using both NVDA and JAWS, but inconsistencies arise—sometimes the modal doesn’t get announced correctly or focus doesn’t return to the trigger button after it closes. In my attempts to debug this, I've logged various states of the modal and the button, but the output hasn’t provided much clarity. Could it be related to how I’ve structured the HTML or the timing of my JavaScript execution? Any insights on how to ensure that my implementation is robust and adheres to best practices for accessibility would be greatly appreciated. Are there specific tools or libraries you recommend for testing these features on Linux environments? Looking to leverage community knowledge on this pressing accessibility requirement! Has anyone else encountered this? My development environment is Windows. Thanks in advance! My development environment is Linux. Any ideas what could be causing this? I'm coming from a different tech stack and learning Python. Is there a simpler solution I'm overlooking? This is part of a larger service I'm building.