> L. David Baron > One other point is that I'd been told by some people that ARIA > itself was only a short-term stopgap until additional semantic > elements / attributes were available in HTML. If that's the case > (is it?), how concerned should we be about long-term issues? It would be quite risky to assume ARIA is stop-gap. How do you see the need for ARIA going away? Do you really think people will suddenly stop using or developing JavaScript UI toolkits at some point? Or is some better extensibility mechanism going to take over, which allows for a11y semantics to be added? If ARIA is to go away, we'll need standards and consistent implementations for HTML widgets. We'll need a widget extensibility layer which provides some other means of exposing a11y semantics will need to be added, and all browsers will need to have some way of supporting that. There is no guarantee we will get there -- that all vendors will be willing or that 3rd party solutions will find traction. The need for a11y APIs has never gone away on the desktop -- developers are always creating new widget sets even when there is a built-in one. That is why a11y APIs are so important. Developers will always want to create their own widgets and those should be made accessible. - Aaron
Received on Thursday, 22 May 2008 09:38:58 UTC