Action item complete re SCR 21

I had an action item to get back to my contact in the Canadian Government
about SCR21 and their questions with it. From the response, it appears that
SCR21 is perceived as an anti-technique rather than a technique ... it is
perceived as instruction what NOT to do. At CSUN the folks a Freedom
Scientific said JAWS no longer takes a static snapshot of the page to work
off of, but rather continually to query the DOM for changes. I think VO and
NVDA do the same. Here is the contact in the Canadian Government's response
below:

==== start of response====

The main issue was with the technique telling what DOM manipulation
JavaScript methods not to use when there is no evidence that there is any
impact on accessibility or any negative impact to the DOM when using those
methods (although supposedly document.write can be a bit flaky). The only
justification for the technique that is given is they are not part of the
DOM spec and that one of them won't work in XHTML with the
application/xhtml+xml MIME type. Hardly any justification for this being
one of the WCAG 2.0 sufficient techniques, much less discouraging the use
of those methods.

The use is widespread, in particular innerHTML because of longtime and
widespread browser support. Pretty much every JavaScript framework on the
planet will fail this technique, as will most JavaScript-enabled sites.

Both innertHTML and outerHTML are supported across the board (Firefox
started supporting outerHTML in version 11).

As for innerText, support is not that great and neither is the performance.
The textContent property is much better but IE didn't add support until IE9.

As for outerText, I think it is IE only but there isn't much point with the
other options (just a shortcut for replacing the current element node with
a text node).

So to sum up, there is no point in this technique being part of WCAG 2.0.
It discourages common and harmless coding practices with out any
justification or basis. Ideally this technique would be dropped. If it
needs to be kept because of issues caused by document.write, then just
limit it to that (but there better be a very good accessibility-related
justification given).

As for being on GitHub, I'm glad you guys ended up there. I'm encouraging
people to go that route to share their feedback rather than the other
approach.

==== end of response====

Cheers,

David MacDonald



*Can**Adapt* *Solutions Inc.*

Tel:  613.235.4902

LinkedIn <http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmacdonald100>

www.Can-Adapt.com



*  Adapting the web to all users*
*            Including those with disabilities*

If you are not the intended recipient, please review our privacy
policy<http://www.davidmacd.com/disclaimer.html>