RE: Removal of other semantic elements

Jonas Sicking wrote:
> 
> To be clear, I feel the same way about the change proposals for
> ISSUE-90, ISSUE-91, ISSUE-93, ISSUE-95 and ISSUE-97 as I do for
> ISSUE-96. I.e. that removing semantic elements and attributes is bad
> for accessibility, even when ARIA can be used to add similar or
> equivalent semantic meaning.
> 
> I'm definitely interested to hear what people with more accessibility
> related experience than me think about this.
> 
> I believe Steven Faulkner said that he didn't want any other
> "controls" removed from the spec, which I would take to encompass at
> least ISSUE-97. But I'm interested to hear his and others feelings
> regarding the other change proposals too.

Jonas,
I was reminded of this note going back to July 2007 from Al Gilman and the
PFWG, as the WHAT WG work was being re-integrated into W3C space: 

	"The working group likes the idea of having built in semantics in
HTML and in particular would prefer to have common document elements, such
as widgets built in to the markup. This reduces download size and the
effort required to make a web page accessible. For these reasons, we would
promote the use of such markup over the ARIA approach. That said, we do
believe that HTML 5 will not incorporate document elements for all those
included in the ARIA role taxonomy nor will it include all the states and
properties. For these reasons, backward compatibility for the ARIA
specifications is a must." 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007Jul/0903.html 


I believe that the majority of the accessibility folks have been pretty
consistent on this/these issues from the get-go, and that the current
specification reflects the thoughts/requests articulated 3 years ago
w.r.t. having semantically meaningful elements and browser-based widgets
invoked via a common element (ie: <progress>, <meter>, etc.). I suspect
that the series of Change Proposals you note above will likely not find a
high level of support from others in the larger accessibility community
(although I dare not speak for others); however FWIW I for one do not
agree with any of them.

JF

Received on Friday, 2 April 2010 19:56:40 UTC