Re: picking up on some comments in IRC on ARIA

On Sep 2, 2009, at 2:47 AM, Steven Faulkner wrote:

>
>
> <othermaciej> I'm not sure a strict mapping to accessibility APIs  
> makes sense, because it would make it impossible to put any novel  
> and clever heuristics on the UA side instead of the AT side --
> Can you explain this further? if the UI is not mapped to  
> accessibility APIs Assistive technology has to pull this info from  
> the DOM, which is something you suggested previously in the alt=""  
> vs role="presentation" discussion was not desirable for voiceover.

What I mean is, I don't think it makes sense to define a mandatory  
standard mapping to accessibility APIs for all possible HTML elements  
and attributes.

I do think that browser should communicate with AT by mapping to  
accessibility APIs (and that's exclusively the way Safari/WebKit talks  
to VoiceOver).

But the browser should be free to implement heuristics for poorly  
marked up content on the browser side, so the API mappings can't be  
mandated by spec. In particular, when using Safari with VoiceOver,  
some of the heuristics are implemented on the WebKit side before  
mapping to the accessibility API. That lets us put less browser- 
specific logic in VoiceOver. But to do that, we need freedom on how  
exactly we map particular markup to the accessibility API.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Wednesday, 2 September 2009 09:58:05 UTC