To access localhost from your Android device you'll need to do (more than) a few things: If you have an IRL mobile device you'd like to use to test out mobile screen readers and other assistive apps you can reach localhost there too! Android check "Press Tab to highlight each item on a webpage" under the "Accessibility" section.Open up Preferences > Advanced in Safari.Safari requires an extra setting to allow keyboard navigation: Narrator & Edge is not explicitly in the survey but I think it's still worth testing as Edge's adoption increases. This notion of technology pairings is important for testing since some combinations do not play well together and some combinations aren't widely used.īelow are pairings in order of usage (omitting paid screen readers) according to a September 2019 survey of screen reader users: They recommended that I only test Internet Explorer with NVDA and Edge with Narrator. When working on a11y at a previous company, I worked closely with a team at Microsoft. TalkBack (made by Google, pre-installed).VoiceOver (made by Apple, pre-installed).Narrator (made by Microsoft, pre-installed).Please reach out if there are other topics you'd like to hear about! Screen Readers
While this post will focus solely on setup, later posts in this series will cover other parts of accessibility manual testing. Extra configuration needed to test your project on different platforms.
These steps are for using free screen readers with a Mac development environment. This meant keeping in mind a few key things and going through some extra steps. Then, I opened up C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts, and added those lines to it.When I sat down with my brand new work computer, I wanted to get set up to manually test accessibility using as many browsers as I could. Then, I took all of the lines in my hosts file on my Mac, and copied them into a new file, and did a search and replace on the normal localhost IP of 127.0.0.1, with that new IP.
Then, I found out what IP address the virtual Windows thinks mymac.local resolves to. In other words, find out what your computer is called on the network. Use this name, followed by ":3000", to access your local Rails server." " followed by a name ending with ".local". You will see a message saying, "Other computers on your local subnet can access your computer at. "Go to System Preferences on your Mac and click the Sharing icon, then switch to the Services tab. I wanted IE within Parralels to also interpret these, but it does not recoginize localhost, or 127.0.0.1 the same.īut thanks to a few suggestions here, I figured it out.
I have a hosts file configured to interpret lots of different domains locally, e.g., I develop lots of websites on a virtual server on my Mac. Optionally, you can even comment the lines that start the Parallels DHCP-NAT server in /Library -> StartupItems -> Parallels -> Parallels, as with this setup, you use neither DHCP nor Parallels' NAT (but OS X's own NAT is used). Now you can access your Macs's development server by entering yourcomputer as the URL in IE, no matter what IP addresses are assigned to your mac.