Re: Discussing ARIA in HTML5 integration

On Apr 10, 2008, at 17:06, Jon Gunderson wrote:
>
> It should also be noted just because HTML5 is being developed  and  
> implemented it does not mean all developers will use it.  If people  
> use HTML5 and it supports accessibility those resources will not  
> need to use ARIA (Hurrah for those developers!).  Other developers  
> for various reasons will choose not to use HTML5 technologies and  
> will need to use ARIA to make their resources more accessible.

ARIA has been put forward as a mechanism for retrofitting  
accessibility to existing DOM scripting-based systems. Legacy systems  
using DOM scripting consist predominantly of text/html and of SVG to a  
minor extent. HTML 5 is the spec for processing text/html even if  
authors aren't knowingly using HTML5. It follows from browser software  
architecture that application/xhtml+xml inherits the above-DOM  
processing from text/html.

Which other languages besides text/html, application/xhtml+xml and SVG  
is ARIA expected to cater for? Surely potential future languages that  
have not yet been implemented in browsers in a legacy form should be  
developed to be natively accessible and not to need retrofitted  
accessibility in the first place.

(MathML isn't used in a way that needs ARIA except perhaps for the  
live region features.)

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Thursday, 10 April 2008 18:49:03 UTC