3.3 and 3.4: natively or via an interface

Lauren Wood raised the question of whether it was necessary for authoring
tools to provide the functionalities required in section 3.3 and 3.4
themselves, or whether it would be sufficient for them to expose those
functions to an interface which could be used by an assisitve technology.

My opinion is that they need to be available in the tool itself. The
simplest assistive technology I know of is the font size selection, which
doesn't work through any interface, but does introduce the problems of
reduced navigation speed and capacity whic hare met by users of serial
media, or people with concentration or short-term memory problems.

This is an issue which has recently been discussed in the User Agent
group, and they appear to have decided that nearly all of the functions
required were deemed necessary to have as native implementation.

(The changes wwill be in their next working draft.)

cheers

Charles McCathieNevile

--Charles McCathieNevile            mailto:charles@w3.org
phone: +1 617 258 0992   http://www.w3.org/People/Charles
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative    http://www.w3.org/WAI
MIT/LCS  -  545 Technology sq., Cambridge MA, 02139,  USA

Received on Thursday, 8 April 1999 17:21:32 UTC