Re: ISSUE-96 Change Proposal

On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 9:39 AM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com> wrote:
>
> On Apr 1, 2010, at 8:00 AM, Steven Faulkner wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>> i agree that it is better for  accessibility to have native controls
>> as the properties of these controls can be hooked up to accessibility
>> APIs by the browser.
>
> This point is worth noting. Appropriate semantic markup for application
> controls does not mean extra work has to be done by a screen reader or other
> assistive technology, as Shelley suggested. Rather, the browser engine
> directly exposes such controls to the appropriate accessibility API, and the
> screen reader at the other end doesn't even have to know if it's a real
> control or ARIA.
>

That's all well and good, but it's still a bad design choice.

How many declarative elements will we have in the future. Dozens?
Hundreds? How many versions of HTML we'll we have to have, because we
have to roll out new versions for a bunch of widgets that could be
created with JavaScript and CSS?

If you have JavaScript, CSS, and ARIA, even if you make no other
changes in any of these for the next dozen years, you can still create
new and useful widgets without having to touch the HTML specification.

Steve, if this is the approach that the accessibility folks want, and
I had a hint of this from someone else recently, I'm especially
disappointed if this is the direction you all are taking.

What kind of message is being sent to developers now?

Oh, use ARIA now, and it's all built into the libraries, such as
jQuery and jQuery UI, which have some really sweet progress bars. But
oh, no, don't use in the future, because we want you to use this
inferior built in browser control. But you'll still have to use ARIA
for everything else, until we can invent all the other new controls
you're going to need to use.

See, developers, all that work you're doing with ARIA now? Like that
stuff that AOL is paying for? Well, it's only _temporary-. Because we
don't think you'll use it...even thought evidently, you are.

This is the message _I'm_ reading from this. And I'm disappointed.

> Regards,
> Maciej
>

Shelley

Received on Thursday, 1 April 2010 16:22:58 UTC