- From: Aaron Leventhal <aaronlev@moonset.net>
- Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2006 18:04:34 -0400
Firefox has support for making dynamic web applications with custom JS widgets accessible, via support for xhtml:role and aaa: properties. If anyone would be interested in taking a look, I would welcome feedback. In Firefox 1.5 the role attribute had to use the xhtml2 namespace. However, Firefox 2 will allow the role attribute in XHTML 1.x. See "XHTML Role Attribute Module": http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-xhtml-role-20060725/ I have a specific question: what about adding the role attribute to whatwg specs? I know Hixie mentioned that he would prefer the element tag itself always specify the role, rather than using a role attribute which can conflict and override that. XBL was going to be the solution for creating custom widgets, which I prefer myself. In an ideal world, I think we'd be able to just create new custom widgets via XBL and define that accessibility there. However, I thought I'd ask anyway because the role attribute does fill some niches: 1) a11y in SVG 2) roles that no specs today have, which provide important accessibility functions, such as liveregion for AJAX accessibility (perhaps we should try to synchronize the 2 sometime) 3) ability to fix a11y in JS apps that exist today 4) ability to create new custom roles -- this is still under development (at the moment it uses RDF, but I believe the group will consider XBL moving forward) 5) The role attribute allows us to specify additional semantics without conflicting with older browsers For more info -- Here are some docs for those interested in comparing what we have with whatwg: Developer docs & intro: http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Accessible_DHTML For those who have w3c member access (apologies for that): Roles: http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/Group/GUI/roleTaxonomy-20060809/ States: http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/Group/adaptable/StatesAndProperties-20060809/ - Aaron
Received on Thursday, 10 August 2006 15:04:34 UTC