RE: html5 editor responds to Canvas accessibility related bugs

I disagree with your response. I think the difference is that we don't
agree that all authors will agree with your vision of how the web should be
used. Tim created a web that was largely static and along came Netscape and
JavaScript. Authors created content that the original author did not
intend. This innovation created a renaissance in the browser and if people
had not done this work you would not be integrating many of their new
designs (details, output, etc.) into HTML 5. Facebook was not created with
HTML 5, yet the innovation was ground breaking nevertheless and amazingly
they are starting to integrate ARIA support so that they can make it
accessible.

You could argue that ARIA was a theoretical innovation when we started but
it is now used world wide. Do we prefer that authors use standard controls
instead of cobbling them up with divs and spans and then making them
accessible - certainly life would be much easier for accessibility people.
There will always be another technology that comes along - canvas, SVG,
etc. that will keep us busy


Rich Schwerdtfeger
CTO Accessibility Software Group

public-canvas-api-request@w3.org wrote on 09/26/2010 02:50:02 PM:

> From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
> To: Frank Olivier <Frank.Olivier@microsoft.com>
> Cc: "public-canvas-api@w3.org" <public-canvas-api@w3.org>
> Date: 09/26/2010 02:56 PM
> Subject: RE: html5 editor responds to Canvas accessibility related bugs
> Sent by: public-canvas-api-request@w3.org
>
> 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.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
>