SVG Replacing HTML Could be Accessibility Disaster

Looking at the archives of this list, it seems that SVG is
seen as a good thing, but looking at the SVG list, it seems
to me that many of the potential users (and industry commentators)
see it as a potential replacement for HTML.

As a replacement, I think people see it as being a much
better page description language than HTML (HTML is not supposed
to be one, but many accessibility problems are the result of 
people pretending that it is).

Such uses of SVG would cause the same sorts of issues as does PDF,
and Flash.

My impression is that accessibility features in the standard are
mainly there to pay lip service, and that the SVG tool developers
are approaching it from a graphics presentation point of view, not
from an accessibility or logical structure point of view.

I get the impression that those people in W3C interested in 
accessibility see it as a better graphics format than bitmaps and
are failing to see the direction that it is really going, which is
against the whole web philosophy, and very presentation oriented.

Received on Friday, 14 July 2000 06:33:10 UTC