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

Murray Maloney wrote:
> At 05:38 PM 6/30/2009 +0100, David Singer wrote:
>> I don't think I said that there are features that MUST not be
>> displayed to sighted users; clearly that would be a silly restriction.
>> But some of these attributes ARE not displayed to sighted users, and
>> as a result, they are invisible, unchecked, by the average web author.
>> The result is a poor level of conformance, I fear; people just don't
>> notice their failures.
>
> It is unfortunate that UIs do not offer more and better features to
> support QA of web documents. The problem of invisible and unchecked
> attribute values is widespread, affecting not only AT attributes, but
> also linking and other attributes. Thus, it would seem that this is not
> a particular flaw of AT attributes. Do you agree? If so, could we untie
> this problem from the discussion of AT attributes? If not, please
> explain further.

While the hidden metadata problem certainly isn't restricted to 
accessibility related attributes, that doesn't mean we can untie it from 
the discussion and ignore it.  For any attribute to which the problem 
applies, the negative effects of the problem need to be evaluated and 
weighed up together with all of the other issues.  Where possible, it 
seems reasonable to find a way to avoid the problem, or at least limit 
its negative impact, which is exactly what the attempts at using more 
visible alternatives are trying to do.

-- 
Lachlan Hunt - Opera Software
http://lachy.id.au/
http://www.opera.com/

Received on Tuesday, 30 June 2009 22:51:33 UTC