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Adobe Flash, once a ubiquitous multimedia platform, played a pivotal role in shaping the digital landscape for nearly two decades. Its capabilities ranged from animated banners and immersive websites to complex online applications and games. Flash content was embedded on websites with the embed or the object element. To the browser, the embedded content is opaque by default, which means Flash content can't be used for the accessibility tree that the browser creates based on the DOM tree, which is used by platform-specific accessibility APIs to provide a representation that can be understood by assistive technologies, such as screen readers. With Flash losing out on popularity, HTML 5 introduced the canvas element, which for the first time allowed developers to draw graphics and animations with either the canvas scripting API or the WebGL API directly natively in the browser. Similar to Flash, such canvas-rendered content is opaque by default and unusable for the accessibility tree. Lastly, the implementation of the WebAssembly Garbage Collection (WasmGC) standard in browsers allowed developers to port applications, written in non-Web programming languages like Kotlin for non-Web platforms like Android, to the Web by compiling them to WasmGC and rendering the entire app into a canvas. In the most extreme of cases, this means that the entire HTML code of an application can consist of a sole canvas tag, which evidently is opaque to the browser and impossible to leverage for the accessibility tree. Without judging their quality, this paper focuses on documenting approaches then and now for making such opaque Web content more accessible to users of assistive technologies.
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