Lightningjs

Appearance

Text-to-Speech / Announcer ​

Blits comes with a built-in Text-to-Speech / Announcer functionality, to easily make your App more accessible. This is something that's often overlooked when developing an App, but having speech assistance integrated into your App is a huge deal for those users who are visually impaired.

Integrated with the router ​

The Announcer in Blits is directly integrated with the router functionality. This means that through simple configuration, a descriptive message can be announced, when navigating from page to page, without the need for adding extra custom code.

Just add an announce key in the configuration of your route, that contains the message you would like to be announced when visiting that route.

js
const routes = [
  // ...
  {
    path: '/settings',
    component: Settings,
    announce: "Welcome to the Settings page",
  },
  // ...
]

Custom announcement messages ​

Furthermore, it's possible to speak out custom messages anywhere in your App logic, for example when a component receives focus, as a reaction to user input, or to announce error messages when a remote API call fails.

Each component in Blits has a this.$announcer.speak() available, which accepts string of a message to be announced.

js
Blits.Component('MyComponent', {
  // ...
  hooks: {
    focus() {
      this.$announcer.speak('MyComponent just got focus')
    }
  },
  keys: {
    right() {
      if(this.focused === this.items.length - 1) {
        this.$announcer.speak('End of row reached')
      } else {
        //
      }
    }
  }
})