Re: Change proposal for ISSUE-85

Jonas Sicking, Wed, 16 Jun 2010 14:28:03 -0700:
> On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 2:08 PM, Richard Schwerdtfeger:
   .......
>> You want to tell someone who is trying to make their web page 
>> accessible be an HTML villain - per your WhatWG post:

Richard: Which priority of constituencies is this? Here is a try: "We 
should prioritize those authors that want to priority AT, and ignore 
those that *also* want to check that they have coded as semantically as 
possible" ?

   .......
>> So, my position is that I am against idiotic conformance requirements that
>> prevent real people from not using combinations of ARIA, script, and
>> CSS that are accessible. I do not believe in restricting the author in the
>> way you are suggesting. I prefer to give the author the tools they need to
>> do what they want and be accessible.
> 
> Note that <a role=button> is *not* as accessible as <button> to me.
> And I'm browsing with both CSS and Javascript enabled. For example it
> creates the wrong context menu when I right click, and it fills the
> page-info dialog with incorrect information about outgoing links.
> 
> So I don't consider it a idiotic conformance requirement to ask people
> to use <button> rather than <a role=button>.

Indeed, it is not idiotic.
 
> And note, all we are doing is asking them nicely to change their
> markup. In no way are they punished if they don't follow our advice.
> In fact, we aren't even asking them unless they ask us first by using
> a validator.

Indeed. There is something wrong with the argument that one shouldn't 
be punished with polite "please improve" message as long as the purpose 
was to be good (aka "accessible"). 
 
Regarding Ian's statement that @role is a godsend, he is right. For 
example, the WAI CG Consensus document of last year noted: [1]

]] automatic validators can detect the presence/absence of @alt but in 
general cannot certify the correctness of the text string. [[

And then went on suggesting that 

]] <img> is only valid when at least one of the following is true:
	*	@alt is present (empty or non-empty) OR
	*	@aria-labelledby is present (non-empty only) OR
	*	the <img> is located within a <figure> that has a non-empty <legend> 
OR
	*	@role="presentation" [[

Note the last point. @role=presentation allows the validator to check 
whether @alt has been used correctly. If the <img> has 
@role=presentation together with a non-empty @alt, then the <img> 
should not count as valid. Unforturately, Valdiator.nu doesn't care. 
But it really should care.

> PS. This whole discussion is another example of how much simpler this
> would be if we removed authoring requirements entirely and left that
> task to lint-style tools. Then we would all be agreeing on what the
> spec say.

+1  That said: perhaps this is possible to incorporate in 
Validator.nu's profile features?

[1] http://www.w3.org/2009/06/Text-Alternatives-in-HTML5

Received on Wednesday, 16 June 2010 22:19:32 UTC