- From: Leif Halvard Silli <xn--mlform-iua@xn--mlform-iua.no>
- Date: Mon, 13 Feb 2012 14:32:43 +0100
- To: HTMLWG WG <public-html@w3.org>
Norman Walsh & Robin Berjon (think this were the words of Robin) on native HTML accessibility versus ARIA + CSS + XML, at XMLPrague last week: [1] ]] 2.3. The Accessibility of XML Theoretically, accessibility of XML should be at least as good, perhaps better than HTML because the opportunity exists for expressing richer semantics in the document. In practice, this is utterly wrong. Had XML become widespread on the web, languages for mapping accessibility onto XML documents could have been developed. Since it didn't, they weren't and the result is that HTML documents have much greater accessibility because so much is known in advance about the semantics of the elements. Perhaps ARIA and CSS would provide a framework for building some accessibility into XML on the web, but it's not likely to be sufficient for the more complex cases. [[ If these words are true, why are we then trying to ARIA-fy everything related to HTML accessibility? In particular, why remove native features? How can Jonas be right when he claims that it will be simpler to be able to say "just use ARIA" as opposed to "use @longdesc for <img> and @summary for table and …" ? (I noted that Rich Schwerdtfeger from the ARIA community once last year said a similar thing: that ARIA in the long run could take over even for @alt.) [1] http://www.xmlprague.cz/2012/files/xmlprague-2012-proceedings.pdf -- Leif Halvard Silli
Received on Monday, 13 February 2012 13:33:17 UTC