Reefchat is a Web2/AJAX accessible chat room application that began as a W3C WAI-ARIA proof of concept to show that DHTML Web applications can be accessible. The project began originally with a grant from the Mozilla Foundation who paired this project up with Fire Vox (by Charles Chen) - the only ARIA compliant screen reader at the time. The original goal as a proof of concept was acheived when Reefchat along with Fire Vox was succesfully demoed at the W3C W4A conference which resulted in several academic papers published in in various journals. Two of these papers published in the ACM are publicly available: Ajax Live Regions: Chat as a Case Example (PDF) and Ajax Live Regions: ReefChat Using the Fire Vox Screen Reader as a Case Example (PDF).
Reefchat was designed to support ARIA compliant screen readers such as Fire Vox, Orca, NVDA, Windows Jaws (partial) with the following features: ARIA Live Region Support, Chat log history, and Message highlighting. You can download the original proof of concept code (zip) written in vanilla JavaScript.
