Re: Screen-reader behaviour

On Sep 2, 2007, at 7:27 PM, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:

>
> cc- wai-xtech. They know this stuff.
>
> On Sun, 02 Sep 2007 18:27:42 +0200, Sander Tekelenburg <st@isoc.nl>  
> wrote:
>
>> At 10:48 -0400 UTC, on 2007-09-02, Al Gilman wrote:
>>> To: public-html@w3.org, wai-xtech@w3.org
>>> At 3:58 AM +0200 31 08 2007, Sander Tekelenburg wrote:
>
>>>> At 13:18 -0400 UTC, on 2007-08-30, Al Gilman wrote:
>>>> Are you saying you have input from real actual flesh and blood  
>>>> developers of
>>>> Jaws and such?
> ...
>>>> Can you get them to participate in the HTML WG?
>>>
>>> I seriously doubt it.
>>
>> Why? Why would a HTML UA be unwilling to contribute to HTML5?
>
> Because is it expensive (very expensive to try and deal with this  
> group - I know of several HTML UAs where nobody is interested in  
> participating. How many of the major phone browsers are represented  
> here?

At least Opera Mini, Safari, Opera Mobile, Pocket IE, S60 Browser.

Blazer and NetFront are not represented. I don;t know what other major  
phone browsers there are. ＜http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qpr 
id=6＞ does not indicate any obvious other choices.
>
>
>>>> The theory is
>>>> important, but without input from the practice side, we aren't  
>>>> going to get anywhere.
>>>
>>> I'm sorry, the accessibility APIs are practice
>>
>> Sure, but what does authoring HTML (with universality and  
>> accessibility in mind) have to do with OSs' accessibility APIs?  
>> We're trying to
>> improve HTML such that it becomes easier and more attractive to  
>> authors
>> to produce content that provides universality and accessibility.
>
> In the real world, the way to present information to assistive  
> technology is via OS accessibility APIs. An HTML list, or checkbox,  
> is related to the OS' notion of a checkbox so the AT can figure out  
> what to do with it. Some ATs have special handling for Web browsers,  
> but this makes them much more expensive to produce and maintain, and  
> less likely to be overall compatible with browsers, instead relating  
> to one or two specifically.

I don't know of any screen reader that doesn't special case the  
browser to some extent.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Monday, 3 September 2007 05:03:57 UTC