Re: html5 editor responds to Canvas accessibility related bugs

On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 5:40 AM, Richard Schwerdtfeger
<schwer@us.ibm.com> wrote:
>
> I would agree but imagine you are a company that has just bought some
> startup that uses a canvas editor. The first thing that happens is it needs
> to turn that puppy around and get it out the door in product. If you tell
> the dev. team that what they did was stupid and the way to make it
> accessible is to start over from scratch vs. add an API to track the caret.
> They will choose the inexpensive route.

Exactly. That's why IMHO we must NOT provide them with an inexpensive
route. If their ONLY option to make things accessible is to drop
canvas, then they'll have no choice.

By providing a caret/selection accessibility API, we would be _harming
accessibility and usability_ by making it possible to do the wrong
thing.


> Yes, but you keep ignoring the points we are making - a common debating
> tactic.
>
> 1. Not everyone will clip the belt in the front.
> 2. Removing the API will not prevent people from drawing a caret. To your
> point, not everyone thinks about
> accessibility when developing new technology. Hence, we have Bespin.

Realistically, the people doing this aren't going to (correctly) use
the accessibility APIs to make such tools accessible, unless they
match the criteria I described in detail here (near the end):

   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-canvas-api/2010JulSep/0028.html

So far nobody has proposed an API that matches those criteria, and
having tried to make some, I'm not sure it's possible. Until we have a
proposal on the table that actually addresses those criteria, we're
not arguing about whether to make things accessible, we are instead
just playing accessibility theatre.


> Now if you ask me should we encourage people not to use <canvas> for this
> purpose I would agree. However, you can't
> regulate people just by using accessibility as a tool to do it.

I'm not saying we should. I'm saying we should provide better APIs for
contentEditable to make it more likely that people will do the right
thing.

-- 
Ian Hickson

Received on Monday, 27 September 2010 20:32:21 UTC