- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2007 05:24:00 +0000 (UTC)
- To: Richard Schwerdtfeger <schwer@us.ibm.com>
- Cc: HTMLWG WG <public-html@w3.org>, XHTML2 WG <public-xhtml2@w3.org>
On Wed, 17 Oct 2007, Richard Schwerdtfeger wrote: > > We have a solution with ARIA that causes people with disabilities to be > able to access this new web. I think that's overstating the case a little. The ARIA features don't make the Web magically accessible. They make Web pages *that use the attributes* accessible, assuming they are used correctly (which is non-trivial and hard to test). There are other solutions which solve the same problem in different ways, in many cases without requiring the authors to specifically go out of their way to support users with disabilities (though these features still have to be used, and used correctly). [1] There are no solutions that I'm aware of that will causes people with disabilities to be able to access this new web without authors changing their pages to use new features, which is what we really need. [1] For example, providing more native widgets in the way that XForms and HTML5 do, or binding widgets found in the "semantic layer" (HTML, XForms) to specific styles and layouts in the "presentation layer" (SVG, CSS) using an explicit binding (CSS, XBL, XSLT). Most of these combinations of technologies are easier to test for most authors than ARIA would be, and thus more likely to actually make the Web accessible. -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Thursday, 18 October 2007 05:24:11 UTC