Re: html 5 and accessibility issue

On Jun 30, 2007, at 11:23 PM, Lachlan Hunt wrote:

>
> Sander Tekelenburg wrote:
>> At 17:36 +0200 UTC, on 2007-06-30, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>>> On Sat, 30 Jun 2007 17:28:58 +0200, Robert Burns  
>>> <rob@robburns.com> wrote:
>>>> That's when fallback content is needed: for non-text media (that is
>>>> sometimes serviced through plug-ins).
>>> Isn't that a problem with the plugin?
>> Can you describe how we can leave the the technique/syntax to  
>> provide textual
>> alternatives up to plugin developers and still comply with our design
>> principles' Priority of Constituencies and Universal Access?
>
> You are incorrectly assuming that a textual alternative is needed  
> to make content accessible.  Try doing some research into how  
> formats like Flash, PDF and other plugins have incorporated  
> accessibility features directly in themselves.

The term research seems to be used way too often in these discussions  
as a dismissive remark like: "Try doing some research". I don't know  
if the chair is bothered by this, but I am. -Its perfectly reasonable  
that someone thoroughly familiar with flash media's fallback  
capabilities could still feel HTML needs its own fallback mechanisms.  
To paraphrase try telling someone using an iPhone how nice the flash  
fallback content would be if they had a flash plugin.That sounds like  
the old smug frame fallback messages. Something like:

<object src="someflash.swf">If you had flash, you'd know what this  
object was about</object>.

At another point I had suggested we might want to recommend or even  
require that conforming implementations should expose metadata within  
image formats such as png, gif, jpeg, etc. That was dismissed because  
of how difficult it is to write metadata extraction code. Now were  
told that implementations can simply extract metadata from formats  
that they're not even familiar with and expose that when the plugin  
is missing.

Can we all presume the other parties we're discussing these issues  
are no simply misinformed, but might have something valuable to say  
( I suggested before that this is a necessary precondition to  
objectivity and I stand by that).

Take care,
Rob

Received on Sunday, 1 July 2007 05:26:09 UTC