User Contexts: identifying assistive technologies

I'm on record as expressing doubts about whether User Contexts should allow
active assistive technologies to be disclosed, primarily for the reason that
this could harm interoperability and standards-conformance by encouraging Web
application authors to write to the implementation rather than to the
specifications and to introduce AT-specific hacks that work around bugs. This
practice reduces the incentive for AT developers to fix bugs or to achieve
greater interoperability, and thus could be bad in the long run even if it
assists users in the short term.

Nevertheless, if we are going to disclose assistive technologies, as was
pointed out to me off-list in response to my requirements-gathering proposal,
the current requirements and spec are inadequate: they cover only screen
readers and allow only one name and version to be retrieved, whereas there
could be several independent assistive technologies (screen reader, screen
magnifier, etc.) active on a user's system simultaneously.

Proposal

dictionary assistiveTechnology {
  DOMString name;
  DOMString? version;
};
then return a sequence or array of the above.

Received on Saturday, 1 June 2013 04:04:13 UTC