Re: Keyboard support of mouse events for UAAG

I don't think mouseovers should be always considered a "poor authoring 
practice" that "need repair" (though of course any practice can be 
abused).  For example, a mouseover can produce help information in a 
temporary popup window--- one that doesn't timeout like "title".   Or 
cascading menus which have made Mac users happy for years (which also 
requires other mouse events to emulate) Users with disabilities that 
prevent use of the mouse should have access to the same information.

That does leave the lack of implemenation experience I realize.  But I 
don't think there's really much implementation experience for all other 
checkpoints, e.g. communicating with assistive technologies ( section 5), 
and if we're lenient there we should be lenient here.

Len

At 01:51 PM 2/9/01 -0600, Jon Gunderson wrote:
>Chairs,
>The User Agent working group has had a long standing requirement for the 
>user to interact with active elements in a device independent way.  In 
>recent teleconferences we have been considering removing the requirement 
>to provide keyboard access to mouse based event handlers (onMouseOver, 
>onMouseOut, onClick) that are explicitly associated with an element as 
>part of the minimum requirement for conformance to UAAG.
>
>The reasons for reducing the requirement for active elements:
>1. We do not have any implementation experience for this feature.
>
>2. Without implementation experience we do not know how the inclusion of 
>the feature will affect accessibility
>
>3. This is a repair requirement for poor authoring and including the 
>requirement will continue to support poor authoring practices
>
>4. In general other repair requirements are a lower priority in UAAG
>
>5. Without implementation experience we may need to go to Candidate 
>Recommendation until implementation shows a P1 benefit, delaying 
>publication of current requirements.
>
>
>The reasons to maintain requirement:
>1. It is an important accessibility problem and that User Agent needs to 
>require the repair
>
>My question to the coordination group is do you agree with the reasons for 
>reducing the requirement to eliminate support for pointer based events as 
>part of the minimum requirement for conformance, or do you think that this 
>is such an important problem that we should include, even though we do not 
>have any implementation experience?
>
>Thanks,
>Jon
>Jon Gunderson, Ph.D., ATP
>Coordinator of Assistive Communication and Information Technology
>Division of Rehabilitation - Education Services
>MC-574
>College of Applied Life Studies
>University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign
>1207 S. Oak Street, Champaign, IL  61820
>
>Voice: (217) 244-5870
>Fax: (217) 333-0248
>
>E-mail: jongund@uiuc.edu
>
>WWW: http://www.staff.uiuc.edu/~jongund
>WWW: http://www.w3.org/wai/ua
>
>

--
Leonard R. Kasday, Ph.D.
Institute on Disabilities/UAP and Dept. of Electrical Engineering at Temple 
University
(215) 204-2247 (voice)                 (800) 750-7428 (TTY)
http://astro.temple.edu/~kasday         mailto:kasday@acm.org

Chair, W3C Web Accessibility Initiative Evaluation and Repair Tools Group
http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/IG/

The WAVE web page accessibility evaluation assistant: 
http://www.temple.edu/inst_disabilities/piat/wave/

Received on Friday, 9 February 2001 16:47:49 UTC