RE: html5 editor responds to Canvas accessibility related bugs

IOW 'Why will people make accessible canvas elements?' 
Quite frankly, 'Why?' is not a question that we (the engineers) will have to answer. 

Canvas is a tool in the html5 toolbox. Authors will use canvas for reasons and scenarios that we will not be able to enumerate. They will create UIs with canvas - this is a very safe bet - and nobody will be able to dissuade them with a 'canvas doesn't have accessibility, don't use it for UIs' argument.

Because canvas is essentially just a bitmap, the author will have to do additional work to add more (accessibility) information. This is unavoidable.

Our responsibility is to ensure that authors have a mechanism for making canvas UI accessible. Our engineering responsibility (wrt the first question above) is to ensure that the mechanism is not overly cumbersome.

Who will ensure that web pages (with canvas UIs) are accessible? Quite frankly: this is not a problem that just (we HTML5) engineers can solve; just like with today's web, the people that create and use the web will have to prioritize/demand accessibility. 

But first we will have to enable authors to make accessible canvas UIs.


-----Original Message-----
From: public-canvas-api-request@w3.org [mailto:public-canvas-api-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Ian Hickson
Sent: Sunday, September 26, 2010 11:05 AM
To: Richard Schwerdtfeger
Cc: Charles Pritchard; janina@rednote.net; Steven Faulkner; public-canvas-api@w3.org
Subject: Re: html5 editor responds to Canvas accessibility related bugs

On Sun, 26 Sep 2010, Richard Schwerdtfeger wrote:
> 
> We can certainly suggest that authors do something the right way as 
> Ian suggests but frankly that is nothing more than a recommendation.

Why would an author who doesn't care about accessibility enough to use the tools we have provided to make editors accessible, and who instead uses canvas, care enough about accessibility to use the canvas tools we could provide to make editors accessible?


-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
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Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Sunday, 26 September 2010 19:16:11 UTC