RE: Example canvas element use - accessibility concerns

John makes some interesting points in his long email, (amidst some 
perhaps rather inflammatory language).  I think there is a point of 
difference here which might not be obvious, which I'd like to tease 
out.

I feel that good accessibility actually only happens when:
* the specification describes well how it is achieved, at the 
interoperability point(s) it defines (e.g. document format);
* authoring tools are built to support the specification;
* authors understand how to, and do, use that support properly;
* user-agents implement the support;
* users needing accessibility can use the UA support they have to 
access the information in a way they find accessible.

It's not difficult to fail on one of these axes.  Simply putting 
mandates in the spec. is not enough if somewhere else down the chain 
doesn't follow through.  To take a ridiculous, extreme, example:  if 
we mandated that page authors were to fly to the location of 
accessibility-needing users, and explain their pages to them 
face-to-face, we would (if they did it) probably get quite good 
accessibility.  But authors are unlikely to follow through on such a 
mandate;  we 'break the chain'.

It is a subtle balance, and best discussed calmly, I think.
-- 
David Singer
Multimedia Standards, Apple Inc.

Received on Saturday, 21 February 2009 00:54:25 UTC