RE: Please vote on the canvas accessibility proposal

The adom attribute doesn't indicate that the author did a *good* job of adding accessible content that will represent the information contained in the canvas - no technology or spec text can guarantee that.

It merely indicates that the author believes that they have created some content that an AT should use.

If we don't have the adom attribute:
 - Accessibility checkers will not have the ability to programmatically scan for compliance.
 - ATs will read content like 'please upgrade your browser' instead of useful text.

-----Original Message-----
From: Silvia Pfeiffer [mailto:silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com] 
Sent: Monday, February 22, 2010 8:13 PM
To: Richard Schwerdtfeger
Cc: Cynthia Shelly; Andi Snow-Weaver; janina@rednote.net; jongund@uiuc.edu; cooper@w3.org; David Bolter; Steven Faulkner; Frank Olivier; public-html-a11y@w3.org
Subject: Re: Please vote on the canvas accessibility proposal

I am not going to vote on this because I haven't been involved in the
discussion and it's not my area of expertise.

But I have tried to follow the discussion in the meeting minutes etc.
so I have a few questions.

Assuming we have a very clever AT that interprets a canvas, could it
make it accessible without any further (or only little extra) hints?

Meaning: is the ability of being accessible really a function of the
author? Or rather a function of the actual markup of the canvas
combined with the capabilities of my AT? If it is the latter (and
that's my understanding), then marking the canvas with an attribute
that states that the canvas is accessible is not useful: only if my AT
is capable of making it accessible will it really be accessible.

Or in other words: I as a Web page author can only do my best to try
and mark up everything I can to help AT make things accessible. I
cannot ultimately decide whether something is accessible or not for
all combinations of browser/AT of a user.

Given this understanding, to me, the attribute honestly doesn't make
much sense. I am rather interested what extra markup we introduce for
canvas that will help AT make a canvas accessible. Then, if such
markup is available, and depending on how complete it is, my canvas
will be more or less accessible. A binary proposition on whether
something is accessible seems not very useful IMO, but I may be wrong
and misunderstand.

Best Regards,
Silvia.


On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 11:00 AM, Richard Schwerdtfeger
<schwer@us.ibm.com> wrote:
> http://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/44061/20100225_canvas/
>
> Thank you,
> Rich
>
>
> Rich Schwerdtfeger
> Distinguished Engineer, SWG Accessibility Architect/Strategist

Received on Tuesday, 23 February 2010 04:34:54 UTC