- From: John Foliot <john@foliot.ca>
- Date: Wed, 1 Feb 2012 21:19:38 -0800
- To: "'Charles Pritchard'" <chuck@jumis.com>, "'Jonas Sicking'" <jonas@sicking.cc>
- Cc: "'Laura Carlson'" <laura.lee.carlson@gmail.com>, "'Silvia Pfeiffer'" <silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com>, "'Sam Ruby'" <rubys@intertwingly.net>, "'Paul Cotton'" <Paul.Cotton@microsoft.com>, "'Maciej Stachowiak'" <mjs@apple.com>, "'HTML WG'" <public-html@w3.org>
Charles Pritchard wrote: > To: Jonas Sicking > > > Hence, the parties that we are asking to be changed here is not AT > > software but rather browsers. So far I have not heard browser claim > > that this is a too hard change to make. > > Yeah, you're hearing the claim from authors and a11y experts instead. > There's a reason for that. One of the reasons is that a significant part of the problem is at the OS / Accessibility API level. > > All I hear is people trying to keep status quo and worried about > > suggesting any changes to any software, rather than see what solution > > would lead to the best accessibility. > > I assure you, the a11y experts commenting on this thread have been > working in accessibility for a long time. > Yes, they are conservative, trying to keep some things the same. That's > because there is structure around those things. FWIW, as one active member is this thread, (and also one of those long-time accessibility folk) I am less focused on new versus old (status quo) and more on user needs and interaction patterns. As I concluded in my response to Jonas' Change Proposal (http://www.w3.org/wiki/A11yTF/longdescresponse): "For Jonas' Proposal to truly solve the problem at hand the Browsers would have to address the core issues identified - this is not a mark-up problem, this is a User Agent problem. * For any Proposal to succeed, the Browsers must address the discoverability problem for all users. This is not indicated anywhere in Jonas' Change Proposal. * For any Proposal to succeed, the Browsers must natively support the user-choice of consuming or not consuming the longer textual description. This is not indicated anywhere in Jonas' Change Proposal. * For any Proposal to succeed, the Browsers must preserve the HTML richness of the longer textual description content. Currently with aria-describedby the only way to do this is to visibly render the text on screen, and thus a browser requirement. This is not indicated anywhere in Jonas' Change Proposal. The Accessibility Task Force endorsed retention of @longdesc proposal preserves what support we have in the 3 key areas of Discoverability & User choice, Preservation of HTML Semantics and Richness, and (the limited but existing) User-Agent Support." Jonas indicates that none of the browsers vendors have said they can't address these problems, but we've seen no indication that they are prepared to do so. I have tried, repeatedly, to focus on the end user requirements, and have waited for appropriate solutions to come forward from those browser vendors: Jonas (Mozilla) to date is the only one to even attempt to seriously address the problems (which, frankly, is why I invested the time it took me to reply formally to his proposal - I respected the fact that he was trying to come forward with a solution beyond "deprecate longdesc") Meanwhile, the existing technique (using @longdesc) *does* address those problems, at least for the core user-group that require longer textual descriptions. > > For the rest of us, we're aware that people are still using IE6, that > not everyone throws away their iPhone to get the newest model, with the > newest browser; that some people keep their old laptop, which runs just > fine, but Firefox stopped supporting in version 3; that some people who > can't afford new computers get old ones via recycling programs. We're > aware that people use old and existing software, and that's an OK > situation. That's where WCAG-TECHS comes in. Backward compatibility is also supposed to be one of the foundational tenets of HTML5. JF
Received on Thursday, 2 February 2012 05:20:23 UTC