Re: Keeping Accessibility in mind

On 20 November 2012 12:33, Shane McCarron <ahby@aptest.com> wrote:
> 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.

Well, just a few days ago I was trying to add some role attributes to
a text written in markdown and it was a real pain. I used kramdown,
but resulted in some really ugly markup that was so totally against
markdown principles.

I'm totally in and I totally agree with the importance of A11Y :). I
have a question though (and sorry my ignorance). There's some plan to
use something like html5 + aria? Seeing that people are moving away
from xhtml in favor of html. I guess we'll have to move there
eventually?

I see one issue. if I understand right the idea would be for example,
establish a way to add those role attributes to content. If that will
be to the implementation to do it or inside the markup would start
with the assumption that the first implementation (John's G.) would
turn to be immediately "not complying with the standard". It's not
that I worship that, but it's something that we have to have in mid.

Regards,
--
Pablo Olmos de Aguilera Corradini - @PaBLoX
http://www.glatelier.org/
http://about.me/pablox/
http://www.linkedin.com/in/pablooda/
Linux User: #456971 - http://counter.li.org/

Received on Tuesday, 20 November 2012 17:39:16 UTC