Make roads accessible

[1ec5]

The iOS implementation in mapbox/mapbox-gl-native#9950 reads aloud the names of visible roads after naming all the visible POIs. In some settings, the nearby roads may provide better context to the user than the nearby POIs.

https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-gl-native/blob/dcd7da14f6627a09a5840a3046b5708449962f69/platform/ios/src/MGLMapAccessibilityElement.mm#L138-L176

The following information is announced about each road:

• Name
• Route number
• Whether the road is a one-way road
• Whether the road is a divided road (in which case the geometry would be a multilinestring feature)
• The general direction of the road (e.g., “north to south”)

Additionally, the road’s geometry is outlined. This is important to VoiceOver, which also allows the user to tap on any part of the map view to navigate to the accessibility element at the tap point. I’m not sure if it’s useful to outline the road geometry in GL JS.

/cc @tristen

[tristen]

Wow interesting. This all seems valuable to do.

I guess I'm wondering how to strike a balance between general purpose and a specific use case (navigation). You're right, this might be less useful for GL JS as most navigation would be powered by native but I'm sure there are other use cases where highlighting features and passing a template of things voiceover should say would be good to do.

I wonder if there should be a directory of option recipes a user could add as part of their setup (i.e options/navigation-streets.json) thats tailored to use cases like this.

[1ec5]

Some of the attributes described above may be specific to the navigation use case, but I do think that, if we default to making POIs accessible (#1), then we should also default to making roads accessible, as a fallback for areas outside urban business districts.