RE: html5 editor responds to Canvas accessibility related bugs

On Sun, 26 Sep 2010, Frank Olivier wrote:
>
> IOW 'Why will people make accessible canvas elements?' 

No, that's not at all the question. There are lots of use cases for which 
<canvas> makes sense, and for which it makes sense to expose an accessible 
alternative, and so on.

The discussion here is about something for which <canvas> isn't a valid 
use case: making a text editor.


> Quite frankly, 'Why?' is not a question that we (the engineers) will 
> have to answer.

It absolutely _is_ a question we should ask, because if the answer is 
"they won't", then we shouldn't spend time designing an API.


> Our responsibility is to ensure that authors have a mechanism for making 
> canvas UI accessible.

No, our responsibility is to ensure that authors have a mechanism for 
making Web pages accessible. If an author decides to misuse technology, it 
is _not_ our responsibility to provide them with band-aids so that they 
can pretend to have done a good job after all.


> 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.

I strongly disagree. It's our responsibility to make the Web accessible. 
It's of no use for us to invent technologies that can theoretically be 
made accessible if nobody uses them to make the Web accessible. We have to 
make sure that the technologies we invent are either automatically 
accessible (like most of HTML), or, when that's not possible, that they 
are so easy to make accessible that authors actually _want_ to do it, 
without having to be badgered into it by legal threats and government 
policies and so forth.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Sunday, 26 September 2010 19:50:31 UTC