- From: John Foliot - WATS.ca <foliot@wats.ca>
- Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2009 13:34:01 -0800
- To: "'David Bolter'" <david.bolter@utoronto.ca>, "'Boris Zbarsky'" <bzbarsky@MIT.EDU>
- Cc: "'HTML WG'" <public-html@w3.org>, "'W3C WAI-XTECH'" <wai-xtech@w3.org>
David Bolter wrote: > > > Do we need to have an a11y solution for canvas... yes > ...or is it a usage problem > solvable through education and evangelism? I don't know. > > cheers, > David David, <soapbox> With respect: if you are going to produce an element for content authoring on the web, then accessibility aspects (DOM hooks or whatever) need to be part of the spec - full stop. Now, this does not mean that you need to deliver exact functionality to all users - a11y has never even hinted that this is a requirement - what is needed is *equivalent* functionality so that alternative user-agents (or a combination of mainstream user-agents and adaptive technology) delivers to the end user the content's intent. It might take longer, or be less elegant (@longdesc is a wonderful poster-child for this, which many within the working group still don't grok), but it is *inclusive*... it doesn't leave some users standing outside the door with a pat on the head and a "...sorry, we need to do more education and evangelism to make people understand this". What exactly do you think the web accessibility community has been doing for the past decade? (That these types of discussions still need to be had within the greater 'experts community' 10 years after the launch of W3C's WAI simply shows that e & e only goes so far). </soapbox> So again, to the first question - yes. JF
Received on Wednesday, 18 February 2009 21:34:42 UTC