Re: Working Group Decision on ISSUE-131 caret-location-api

On Sat, Apr 30, 2011 at 2:06 AM, Richard Schwerdtfeger <schwer@us.ibm.com>wrote:

> Canvas is the closest thing to what developers are familiar with on Windows
> which today is the pervasive client platform. If canvas is in the
> specification it will be used extensively and this leaves HTML itself
> inaccessible.
>

Are you claiming that Win32 developers are used to implementing their own
widgets from scratch using GDI, and therefore they will come to the Web and
try to do the same thing with canvas instead of using HTML properly?

I will also tell them that the reason it is inaccessible is because the
> browser manufacturers refused to make it accessible and not because it was
> technically impossible.
>

I dispute that canvas can be made accessible in general. Has anyone
demonstrated that it's technically possible to make games such as
first-person-shooters, "Asteroids", or "Pac-Man" accessible to blind users?
How about fractal generators, seam-carving demos, Google Street View, or
Google's Body Browser?

The "shadow DOM" proposal can be used to make some canvas applications
accessible to blind people, but there you're really just creating
alternative interfaces that bypass the canvas altogether. That can be done
without specific canvas accessibility APIs and you haven't really made the
canvas itself accessible, you've made the underlying application accessible.

Rob
-- 
"Now the Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians, for
they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures
every day to see if what Paul said was true." [Acts 17:11]

Received on Saturday, 30 April 2011 12:58:13 UTC