Why I don't attend the weekly teleconference (Was: Input on the agenda)

>I don't think I have actually seen an answer to this question: do accessibility UAs, and users needing accessible access, look for the summary attribute, or >have these users and/or their UAs given up looking?

the most poular screen reader JAWS announces the summary on data
tables by default, if it is used on a layout table it is generally not
announced as JAWS filters out layout tables (as the table element use
for layout has been widely abused).

This information and much more about the summary issue has been
collected on the html esw wiki
http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/SummaryForTABLE

regards
steve


2009/6/30 David Singer <singer@apple.com>:
> At 16:32  -0500 29/06/09, Murray Maloney wrote:
>>
>> Rather, I would like to engage in a logical discussion on the assertion
>> that 'because a large percentage of the web's content does not use these
>> attributes so as to be useful, therefore they can never be useful.'
>>
>> A. I think that any site that caters to readers who appreciate having
>> these features provided by these attributes would be able to advertise same
>> to their community and their users could take advantage of those features.
>> Feel free to correct my thinking on this, but I think that I have at least
>> this much right.
>>
>> B. So, while a non-sighted reader may not benefit from these features on
>> sites where the markup is not useful or usable, there still exists the
>> opportunity for the features to be useful to that community. Did I make any
>> mistakes in getting from A to B?
>>
>> So, can you agree with me that 'summary is too polluted to ever be useful'
>> is actually a straw man argument?
>
> No, I don't think so.  I, and many web users, visit many many sites. A few I
> visit repeatedly (e.g. my company's internal web service, a couple of news
> sites).  But the majority are occasional; for example, yesterday the web
> sites of restaurants in London.
>
> I agree it's possible I will learn or know that my habitual sites are well
> constructed and unusually annotate their tables correctly.
>
> But for the rest of the sites I visit, if I were to learn that the vast
> majority provide nothing useful in summary, I am pretty sure I'd give up
> wasting my time asking the UA to show me the value, because the UA would be
> continually presenting me with junk.  I would then fail to find the
> occasional site that had authored it correctly.  And once those sites learn
> that many of the population they thought they were providing for don't even
> notice the provision, they start giving up on providing summary as well.
>  That is the vicious circle that we fear we have got into.
>
> I don't think I have actually seen an answer to this question: do
> accessibility UAs, and users needing accessible access, look for the summary
> attribute, or have these users and/or their UAs given up looking?
>
>>
>> Given the WorldWide scope of the Web, it is easy to understand why one
>> might think that everything that we do should be geared toward everybody on
>> the planet. After all, if we are going to be egalitarian, then let's treat
>> everybody equally. But that's not how I see it, nor, I suspect, is it really
>> how you see it. Really, some people have special needs to which we, as a
>> civilization, have a responsibility to respond.
>
> That's not what I said at all, and I'm sorry if I wasn't clear.  What I said
> was that it may be better if the features that support accessible access are
> also perceived by, and used by, and hence verifiable by, the rest of the
> population, then they would also be perceivable through 'normal' UAs and
> verifiable by the average web author.
>
> The reason that there is a discussion over accessibility issues is precisely
> because we take the need and responsibility seriously; the desire to do
> something that is effective in practice, the desire to check whether what we
> have done in the past has worked, and so on.
> --
> David Singer
> Multimedia Standards, Apple Inc.
>
>



--
with regards

Steve Faulkner
Technical Director - TPG Europe
Director - Web Accessibility Tools Consortium

www.paciellogroup.com | www.wat-c.org
Web Accessibility Toolbar -
http://www.paciellogroup.com/resources/wat-ie-about.html



-- 
with regards

Steve Faulkner
Technical Director - TPG Europe
Director - Web Accessibility Tools Consortium

www.paciellogroup.com | www.wat-c.org
Web Accessibility Toolbar -
http://www.paciellogroup.com/resources/wat-ie-about.html

Received on Tuesday, 30 June 2009 08:40:43 UTC