Re: ARIA All The Things

John,

What ever you want to call it, YES we want more responsive user agents and
not just support for assistive technologies.  In the SVG accessibility
world, we are looking at user agents adding a better keyboard navigation
for non AT users and improving the styles of the graphics for users for non
AT users. Some of these things we would like to see happen through media
queries in the host language. Others like providing better navigation will
mean the user agent will need to look at markup.  Markup is also used via
SVG AAM to support AT.  On the graphics side we are definitely looking for
a continuum of support from user agent and AT; in the host language and
through ARIA markup.

                                                              
     Regards,                                                 
                                                              
    Fred Esch                                                 
 Watson, IBM, W3C                                             
  Accessibility                                               
                                                              
 IBM Watson       Watson Release Management and Quality       
                                                              






From: "John Foliot" <john.foliot@deque.com>
To: "W3C WAI Protocols & Formats" <public-pfwg@w3.org>
Date: 10/27/2015 04:54 AM
Subject: ARIA All The Things



Colleagues,

"...thinking it will progress like DPub, namely it's coga- but there may be
things we want to pull into core ARIA." (IRC aside comment)

After following along on the #ARIA IRC channel Tuesday afternoon at TPAC, I
am having grave concerns that we are looking to ARIA All The Things – that
somehow moving all of our accessibility solutions into some kind of
ARIA-world, separate but somehow equal, is how we can solve accessibility
issues.

ARIA – Accessible Rich Internet Applications – was developed to convey
document/application structure, and to provide a means of mapping GUI
interactions to the Accessibility APIs so that Assistive Technology could
work with “DHTML”. It was not, as I understand it, created to be the magic
talisman that would expand to solve all accessibility issues moving
forward.

I fear that we’re losing our way here – that we’re getting to a point that
rather than looking to improve and expand on existing mainstream web
technologies, we’re instead building out our own little ghetto. It’s almost
like we’re forgetting our own educational message that a) accessibility is
not a black or white condition, that rather it is a million shades of gray,
and that b) due to aging and other related issues we are all temporarily
“abled” and that we will all likely need some form of accommodation or
assistance at some point or other. We need to be focused on mainstreaming
our design principles, not keeping them in a special “disabled-only” box.

My question to you all is this: am I wrong in thinking how I am thinking?
Is moving all of our accessibility solutions into a “one-stop shop” (aka
ARIA-World) the right way forward? Or do we instead look to get as much of
our concerns addressed using mainstream technology and robust education, so
that developers don’t have to do extra “ARIA work”? That we’ve worked with
other specs and WG’s inside of W3C to ensure all of our web technologies
are accessibility aware, accessibility friendly, and useful and usable by
all content creators, not just those schooled in the Art of ARIA?

I suspect my thoughts and opinions here are pretty obvious, but I don’t
claim to have “The Answer”, and I am curious to hear other’s thoughts here.
I think we need to have this discussion, and relatively soon.

Thanks for your feedback.

JF
​--
John Foliot
Principal Accessibility Strategist
Deque Systems Inc.
john.foliot@deque.com

Advancing the mission of digital accessibility and inclusion