Keeping Accessibility in mind

I originally got involved in this group because I am a member of the W3C
WAI group [1].  That group is the catch-all accessibility (A11Y) group at
the W3C, and when new community groups appear that we think we will have
A11Y impact, we try to assign someone to keep an eye on it.  I have been
using MD for ages, so I volunteered.  However, in the interests of full
disclosure, I wanted everyone to know that I will, from time to time, make
A11Y noises!

So, here is my first noise.  As a stretch goal, I would like to try to
identify a minimal collection of ARIA [2] attributes that we might want to
automatically embed in the transformed output so that it is not only great
(X)HTML, but it is also readily usable by people who rely upon assistive
technologies (e.g., screen readers).  I personally feel this is just being
a good Internet citizen, but I also think it is probably pretty easy to
accomplish.  Using @role [3] and well-defined roles [4] is a great way to
annotate content, and it may be that it is easy for us to identify
automatic, default roles for various MD items.  It is also possible that we
could, via an extension to MD, create an easy way for authors to add simple
ARIA annotation to their documents.

We are still in early days here, but I wanted everyone to know that, while
I will try to be subtle about it most of the time, I am going to be trying
to help ensure that MD output is as accessible as possible.

[1] http://www.w3.org/WAI/
[2] http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/aria
[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/role-attribute
[4] http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab

-- 
Shane P. McCarron
Managing Director, Applied Testing and Technology, Inc.