bVisual

Visio Online

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Testing Visio shape text for WCAG 2.0 pass

The Web Content Access Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 provides the current recommendations for making web content accessible to users with vision impairment, but how do you test if your Visio shapes pass? There are several web sites out there that provide this capability, but all of them require the HEX values, rather than the RGB or HSL that Visio provides natively. Therefore, I have created a Visio callout shape that can be associated with a target shape to report on the values of each of its main color elements and provides hyperlinks to automatically check the contrast ratio on WebAIM.

Color Values Shape


The colour formats that can be selected from either the Shape Data window or the right mouse menu are:

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Narrated Text in Visio for Accessibility

One of the ways that Visio supports accessibility is to provide text that is read out by a screen reader, such as Windows Narrator or JAWS. This Alt Text can be set using Format Shape / Size & Properties tab using the Title and Description text boxes. The Title is the initial text that is read out when a shape is attentioned, and the Description will only read out if the user pauses. The Description text box only allows 255 characters to be entered and displayed, but this is not actually the limit!

VisioAltText
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Understanding Visio Navigation Order

Visio defaults to tabbing from shape to shape in the order that the shapes are added to the page. However, this can end up with an illogical order if you are trying to navigate a diagram with the keyboard, which is often an accessibility requirement. Fortunately, Visio provides a Diagram Navigation pane so that the tab order can be changed, but how does it do it? The following short video shows how the navigation order, displayed as numbers in each shape, is assigned a value as soon as the order is edited.



Accessibility is important in my current project, so understanding how this happens was important to understand, and to surface this order to JavaScript, as we want to list the shapes in a logical order too.
I managed this by adding a User.visNavOrder to the master shape of all the significant masters, and a hidden Shape Data row, labelled “Navigation Order“. This has the following formula for its value:

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Triggering Shape Mouse Enter and Leave JavaScript events in Visio Online

I am working on a project where Visio Online process diagrams are embedded within a SharePoint web page, and was surprised that the JavaScript onShapeMouseEnter() event was not being triggered as the mouse cursor moved over some of my shapes. After much searching by myself, and my colleague Seb Craft, we found that only the sub-shapes in the group were firing the event … So what was the problem?

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Support for the Visio JavaScript API in SharePoint Modern Framework, and more

It was the last day of the MSIgnite conference today, and the video of the final presentation about Visio was worth staying for, even though some of it was content I knew about, and have mentioned in previous posts this week ( see Dive into the world of data-driven operation intelligence with Microsoft Visio, Excel and Power BI). However, there was some content I was particularly pleased to see, and that was about support for the Visio Online JavaScript API support in Modern SharePoint Framework. I have pulled out some of the key slides below, but check out the full session for more information.

The hardworking Microsoft Visio product development team have worked hard to almost match all of the functionality of the old server-side Visio services control, but they haven’t quite got everything. So I cheered when I hear that support for html overlays are in the roadmap to be supported! All I ask for now (almost) is layer control, and I will be very happy.
They also stated that they will be enabling all this functionality for non-SharePoint web sites in the future!
Go to http://aka.ms/voapireference got more details.

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Visio Roadmap @ MSIgnite 2018

VisioRoadmap2018

The first slot of the day at the furthest away room from the main conference area is not the ideal time to present anything, but those attendees that made it saw how many new features have been added to Visio recently, and what is soon to be added. The session recording should be available soon, but for those who can’t wait, here is a spoiler! ( View the session here )

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