Screen readers

What is a screen reader?

A screen reader empowers individuals who are blind or have low vision to effectively navigate and utilize their computers or devices. Employing a synthesized robotic voice, it audibly articulates the text and on-screen elements, facilitating a seamless interaction with digital content.

Recommended browsers and screen readers

Kpow has been tested and supports the following screen readers using either Chrome or Firefox web browsers:

• MacOS: VoiceOver
• Windows: NVDA, JAWS

To enhance accessibility, users can easily configure their preferred screen reader to interact effortlessly with Kpow.

Navigating Kpow with a screen reader

Kpow is designed to be a web application with keyboard shortcuts to quickly perform actions and navigate the interface. Thus, it is recommended that you configure your screen reader to “focus mode”.

Kpow follows the ARIA Authoring Practices Guide (APG) patterns to deliver accessible elements. All elements (such as buttons, menu buttons and dropdowns etc) implement the ARIA spec for keyboard interactions, roles, states and properties.

You can read more about Kpow's keyboard shortcuts here.

Skip links

Kpow employs a skip link to quickly jump to the main content. Simply press the <Tab> key and the skip link will be the first focused element.

Learn about Kpow's user interface

There are three main sections to Kpow's user interface. Here's a list of common components and how you can identify the different sections:

• Navigation menu named "Main menu" - where users can switch between topics, consumers, and so forth
• Top-level menu - global actions such as cluster switch, view notifications and adjust Kpow settings.
• Main content: consists of a tablist + tabpanel.
  • The tablist is always contextual, for example if you are on the topics page you will see tabs for data inspect, data produce, ACLs etc.
  • The main content of the page is always the focused tab. For example the topics configuration table and associated filters.

Perform common tasks

Search data on a topic

1. Open up Kpow in your web browser
2. Focus on the "Main menu" navigation component and select the "Data" link. Press <Enter>.
3. Skip to main content and you will be within the data inspect form.
4. Select the topics you would like inspect. You can do this by focusing on the form item named "Topic(s)"
5. With the topic select dropdown focused, start typing in the topics you would like to search. As you start typing the topic list will filter. Navigate between options using the <Up> and <Down> arrow keys and select a topic by pressing <Enter>
6. Make any other adjustments to the search form that you would like such as key and value serdes and search window.
7. When you are ready to search, focus on the "Search" button and press <Enter>
8. Data inspect is querying the topics. Results will be streamed to your browser. As new results come in your screen reader will read these out. Each data inspect result is focusable with individual actions such as "Copy to clipboard" and "Produce record".