RE: SVG markup thoughts

Leonie,

I don't know if background is a good role to keep, but in experimenting
with markup for navigation and thinking about
personalization/accommodations for sighted users, I am experimenting with
roles that I think may help in those situations.

I see background being used a couple of ways. For folks with cognitive
disabilities, it could be used to focus their attention to a general area
of interest.  For low vision users, it may be needed to help figure out
what is the background for text so the contrast can be increased. To me
tweaking a background has less impact than tweaking an graphic object that
represents data like a bar, area, or scatterplot point, or even a
geographic boundary for a state. Lots of things have backgrounds that could
be difficult to identify if no markup helps you. Panelled charts,
charts-in-charts, STEM diagrams all need help identifying backgrounds from
data.

                                                              
                                                              
                    Regards,                     Fred         
                                                              
                   Fred Esch                                  
       Accessibility, Watson Innovations                      
    AARB Complex Visualization Working Group                  
                     Chair                                    
        W3C SVG Accessibility Task Force                      
                   IBM Watson                                 
                                                              
                                                              






From: Léonie Watson <lwatson@paciellogroup.com>
To: Fred Esch/Arlington/IBM@IBMUS, Richard
            Schwerdtfeger/Austin/IBM@IBMUS
Cc: <public-svg-a11y@w3.org>
Date: 05/14/2015 06:04 PM
Subject: RE: SVG markup thoughts



From: Fred Esch [mailto:fesch@us.ibm.com]
Sent: 14 May 2015 15:59
For things that should not navigate you can provide special roles that
indicate they shouldn't be navigated or read to AT.  The semantic roles:
none and background could be defined to not be part of navigation and not
presented to AT.  I propose a semantic role for background since I see
where it will be needed when increasing contrast.

I’m not sure I understand what the semantic importance of background would
be, given the use case of changing colour contrast? In the conventional
sense that would be a visual change, not a semantic one I think?

Léonie.


--
Léonie Watson - Senior accessibility engineer
@LeonieWatson @PacielloGroup PacielloGroup.com