RE: Thoughts towards an accessible <canvas>

John Foliot wrote:
> Which bring us to the current problem: in virtually every other
> programming language available to application developers today,
> failing to write the ‘code’ to the code’s specification results in
> the application simply not working - in other words a catastrophic
> fail. Applications don’t “sort-of” work, they simply don’t work -
> full stop. As in any other engineering endeavor, the more complex and
> sophisticated the project, the more important it is to ensure all the
> requirements and details are correct, or else your end result is a
> failure.

Failing to write code to a syntax specification results in the code not 
compiling, true, but you're conflating that with the functionality of 
the software--code can be syntactically valid whilst still being a mess 
of half-working, buggy, crash-prone ideas.  I am not aware of any 
programming languages which fail to compile if the resulting program 
would be buggy or inaccessible, so while it sounds like you're saying 
something quite sensible and obvious, you're actually proposing 
something extremely radical, and indeed, mostly unparalleled in software 
development history.

You suggest that if content fails for someone, it should fail for 
everyone.  Here are some more apt analogies which I think illustrate 
your point well:
  - no concerts (or conversations!) without sign-language interpreters 
present
  - no movies shown where someone hadn't written captions (this includes 
watching just-recorded footage on the screens of video cameras)
  - no-one using stairs to a building unless there were also a ramp to 
the same building
  - no books or written texts without braille equivalents
  - no smells (for there are people who cannot smell things and there is 
no equivalent to that for other people)

etc.

Andi
(with apologies to Mark Pilgrim)

Received on Sunday, 22 March 2009 16:30:31 UTC