Re: HTML-A11Y Task Force Consensus on Issue-204 (Updated)

On 5/24/2012 12:54 AM, Jonas Sicking wrote:
> On Wednesday, May 23, 2012, Edward O'Connor <eoconnor@apple.com 
> <mailto:eoconnor@apple.com>> wrote:
> >> While allowing UAs to expose the accessibility tree of @hidden content
> >> is great, I think we should make it a MUST level requirement.
> >
> > My understanding is that some AT implementors believe it would be
> > difficult to comply with such a requirement. That said, I agree that we
> > should encourage UAs to expose the tree to AT if they are able to. Would
> > a SHOULD work for you?
>
> So far I haven't seen such feedback from any implementor. I've only 
> seen me and Maciej speak up on this and we've both said that 
> implementation-wise this is similar to exposing an accessibility tree 
> for the contents of <canvas> elements. Certainly not trivial, but 
> doable and something that needs to be solved in order to make canvas 
> accessible (which I hope we agree should be a MUST level requirement).
>
> However I could easily have missed other implementor feedback. If 
> that's the case a SHOULD level requirement might be ok. But I'd be 
> curious to hear how that implementor was planning on dealing with canvas.

Mozilla and WebKit both have patches to expose the accessibility tree 
for the Canvas sub-dom.
IE has had the Canvas sub-dom accessible since IE9 (their first 
introduction of Canvas).

I'm concerned with the accessibility of the Web Components spec. That's 
an area where I haven't seen discussion.

We've had a lot of back and forth about @hidden; I don't want to jump 
into that again, so I'll stay out of it.

I just want to clarify those two points: Canvas has been made accessible 
via the accessibility tree in three implementations; Web Components 
could use some attention and testing,
and it doesn't have the legacy issues that we're butting up against here 
with @hidden.

-Charles