Google Announces Seismic Change to Docs

Over the course of the next several months, we’ll be migrating the underlying technical implementation of Docs from the current HTML-based rendering approach to a canvas-based approach to improve performance and improve consistency in how content appears across different platforms.

Google Docs and the other tools in the Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) are used by more than 2 billion active users each month. And while there is certainly room for improvement, the current accessibility support for Docs editors is notable. After enabling the Accessibility settings, Docs supports screen readers (ChromeVox, NVDA, JAWS, and VoiceOver), braille displays, and screen magnifiers.

In his article Google Docs Switches to Canvas Rendering, Sidelining the DOM, Richard MacManus summarizes the current model for accessibility in Docs, and how it would change:

Up till now, Google Docs had evolved over the past fifteen years in the familiar pattern of most web applications: its interactivity largely achieved by heavy use of JavaScript code to manipulate the DOM…. The appeal of Canvas is that it enables the developers of Google Docs to bypass all of that persnickety DOM wrangling and just ‘paint’ the document onto the page.

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