Cross-disability access and scope of work

It was a very engaging discussion at the meeting today. Although it wasn't emphasized at the meeting, I expect all participants in the task force to agree that there are many requirements that benefit multiple groups of users who have diverse needs. For example, keyboard operation is essential to users with motor or dexterity-related disabilities who are unable to use a pointing device; it is also essential to screen reader users (though for a different reason). There may be differences, of course, in what constitutes an effective keyboard interface for different users.

I also suggest that it would be helpful to classify proposed solutions according to whether they entail enhancements to the SVG spec, to ARIA, to the Indie-UI User Context spec, to CSS or to authoring practices. (Obviously, these categories are not mutually exclusive, in that some solutions may require work in more than one area.)

An additional field of work that hasn't received much attention to date is the prospect of "cognitive" assistive technologies. I hope the related initiative currently underway in the PF working group will identify requirements and indicate what the capabilities of such tools need to be. Since ARIA makes the semantic content of an SVG graphic explicit, it could potentially be used by tools that visually enhance or modify the presentation to assist the user's understanding by making important components of and relationships in the image perspicuous. As Rich emphasized, ARIA is not just for screen readers, an observation that is often lost.

We should be able to take advantage of the work done elsewhere to support captions and descriptions in synchronized media. I think a good discussion of keyboard operability would be useful, as it hasn't been much  considered in connection with SVG accessibility.


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Received on Friday, 6 February 2015 17:23:00 UTC