Re: HTML-A11Y Task Force Consensus on Issue-204 (Updated)

On May 24, 2012, at 12:54 AM, Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc> wrote:

> On Wednesday, May 23, 2012, Edward O'Connor <eoconnor@apple.com> wrote:
> >> While allowing UAs to expose the accessibility tree of @hidden content
> >> is great, I think we should make it a MUST level requirement.
> >
> > My understanding is that some AT implementors believe it would be
> > difficult to comply with such a requirement. That said, I agree that we
> > should encourage UAs to expose the tree to AT if they are able to. Would
> > a SHOULD work for you?
> 
> So far I haven't seen such feedback from any implementor. I've only seen me and Maciej speak up on this and we've both said that implementation-wise this is similar to exposing an accessibility tree for the contents of <canvas> elements. Certainly not trivial, but doable and something that needs to be solved in order to make canvas accessible (which I hope we agree should be a MUST level requirement).
> 
> However I could easily have missed other implementor feedback. If that's the case a SHOULD level requirement might be ok. But I'd be curious to hear how that implementor was planning on dealing with canvas.

At the recent F2F, Microsoft representatives said that they believed exposing full semantics for aria-describedby content would be very hard to do in IE (in combination with the mainstream screen readers on Windows).

Cheers,
Maciej