Re: Deprecation of DOMAttrModified (Was: DOMActivate vs. Activation Behavior)

On Feb 9, 2010, at 5:26 PM, Jonas Sicking wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 5:20 PM, James Craig wrote:
>> On Feb 9, 2010, at 3:46 PM, Sean Hogan wrote:
>> 
>>> Currently IE has onpropertychange and Firefox / Opera have DOMAttrModified.
>>> Aren't they sufficient?
>> 
>> Even if DOMAttrModified wasn't threatened with deprecation and was
>> implemented consistently across all major browsers, it would still require
>> additional implementation on the part of a screen reader, but no screen
>> reader dev team is going to waste time implementing a feature at relies on a
>> deprecated event model.
> 
> They don't need to. They just need to set the attribute and rely on
> the fact that the browser will send *some* type of notification to the
> page. What that notification is currently varies between browsers, and
> likely will change at some point in the future, but that doesn't
> affect what the screen reader needs to do.

I don't agree with that logic. Most screen readers access the accessibility API rather than touching the DOM directly. This connection would likely rely on the browser to update the DOM based on a change to the accessibility API. Also, perhaps this is a chicken&egg scenario, but it seems unlikely that a screen reader manufacturer would waste dev cycles on a conceptual programming model that may happen in the future but is extremely unlikely to be implemented by web authors until the notification model is standardized. It's almost the accessibility equivalent of asking web developers in 1999 to change all their images to SVG and 24-bit PNGs with the hope that, someday, browsers will support those image types.

Received on Wednesday, 10 February 2010 21:32:57 UTC