Re: Please vote on the canvas accessibility proposal

On Thu, 25 Feb 2010, Steven Faulkner wrote:
> 
> > I mean (non-conforming) cases like:
> > <canvas>Your browser doesn't support canvas.</canvas>
> 
> I think it can be assumed that the non-conforming cases will be in the 
> majority as developers cannot even provide a text alternative for an 
> image in many cases.
> 
> So why should users have this garbage (non-conforming content) presented 
> to them when they are using abrowser that supports canvas?

There are several cases of note here; the only one where it would be 
suboptimal is the case of users with limited vision who can still _see_ 
the canvas, and might be able to operate it (albeit without help with 
respect to focusing, etc) by zooming it. For these users, saying that 
there's no canvas support is indeed suboptimal, though I fear that their 
experience will be so miserable as it is given the lack of proper support 
that this extra level of annoyance will hardly be noticed.

All the other cases I can think of -- braille users with no vision at all, 
speech synth users with no vision at all, text-mode users, etc -- the 
statement that there is no canvas support is actually pretty accurate, 
though not especially kind. It'd probably be better in these cases to 
actually let the user know that they are missing critical functionality 
than to silently say nothing.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Thursday, 25 February 2010 11:01:34 UTC