- From: Matt May <mcmay@w3.org>
- Date: Mon, 31 May 2004 13:10:35 -0700
- To: David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
- Cc: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
On May 29, 2004, at 1:52 AM, David Woolley wrote: >> Just a quick sanity check - moving forward, the requirement to work >> WITHOUT JAVASCRIPT is going away in 2.0, right? And being replaced >> with > > I hope not, as an increasing number of people who wouldn't consider > themselves disabled will refuse to run scripting, especially from > sites run by people unfamiliar to them. Please be careful with this approach: you're saying that we need to craft accessibility guidelines in order to satisfy needs that are orthogonal to disability. These things are out of our scope, and they're the kind of things that would cause the document to be ignored. Scripting and binary objects are accessibility issues on the Web; they also exist on over 85% of sites currently in existence. We ignore this fact at our peril. So, what do we do? Banish scripting from the Web? Certainly not. We may as well have banned tables and frames at the time they came out for all the damage they've done. But it wouldn't have made a bit of difference to developers who saw a tool that met their needs. The approach to solving this is threefold: create techniques and scripts that do minimal harm; get developers to use them, and understand how they work; and develop specifications that eliminate the need for scripting by replacing its most common use cases with declarative code. Which is what we're doing, actually. I'll be starting work on scripting techniques for WCAG 2. The end product will consist of techniques for keeping JavaScript from causing accessibility problems, and producing scripts that authors can take and use freely. I have several expert scripters who have expressed interest in working on this, and welcome more. Today, I'm on my way to a W3C Workshop on Web Applications and Compound Documents[1]. The Protocols and Formats WG position paper[2] explains how we got into the mess we're in, and our ideas on a way out. Other papers[3], at least all of those that I've read, say the same thing: declarative code cancels out scripting, and we need declarative languages to build these user interfaces we've been building all these years with script. This is good news for us, because it could clear out a lot of the weeds associated with scripting. The PFWG is also working on using currently available technologies to ensure that ATs can all interact with modern Web documents and applications. We have to take this on. There is no alternative. Script is here to stay, and if the WCAG document fails to recognize it, it will fail to be adopted. [1] http://www.w3.org/2004/04/webapps-cdf-ws/index.html [2] http://www.w3.org/2004/04/wa-access.html [3] http://www.w3.org/2004/04/webapps-cdf-ws/papers/ - m
Received on Monday, 31 May 2004 16:10:37 UTC