Supporting real accessibility Re: Seeing the open issues

On Tue, 21 Aug 2007 18:55:25 +0200, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:


> I went out of my way to make sure that the tool was written with
> accessibility in mind, such that any compliant aural browser or any  
> screen reader with a compliant browser would be more than able to
> work well with this tool;

I believe we are all sorry that such tools only exist in the hands of a  
very few experts, and in cloud-cuckoo-land. The principles of solving real  
problems, priority of constituencies, and universal access should have, as  
I understand it, led to something that ws useful in the real world rather  
than just for technical purity.

I understand Ian's concern that designing for the real world is  
time-consuming and painful (that's one of the reaons we want HTML 5 in the  
first place) and that he is concentrating already on other work, but in  
practice design for accessibility either includes dealing with actual  
tools or it is largely a waste of time, since the difficulty of getting  
and installing new assistive technologies is extraordinarily high (hence  
the "priority of constituencies" principle). As an example, Opera, a  
particularly standards-compliant browser, is working to provide good  
screen-reader capability across platforms. This takes many months to do,  
and asking users to wait that time, or read the code and build the tools  
themselves is not really very helpful in practice. Thanks, therefore, to  
Philip T for providing a practical solution that has accessibility which  
is meaningful in the real world.

cheers

Chaals

-- 
   Charles McCathieNevile, Opera Software: Standards Group
   hablo español  -  je parle français  -  jeg lærer norsk
chaals@opera.com    Catch up: Speed Dial   http://opera.com

Received on Wednesday, 22 August 2007 12:39:23 UTC