changing state and value programmatically

At today's teleconference, Becky raised a question about the following 
proposed success criteria:

[8] New GL 2.1 Level 1 SC
<proposal>
The states and values of contents that can be changed via the user
interface can also be changed programmatically.
</proposal>


She asked whether providing event handlers for the relevant events would 
satisfy this requirement, or whether a special API would be needed 
specifically to change the states and values.

I took an action to trace the origin of this proposal back to our analysis 
of UAAG.  It stems from Wendy's analysis of UAAG Guideline 6 [1]:

"6.1 Programmatic access to HTML/XML infoset (P1)*
This checkpoint refers to the XML infoset [1].  Seems to me as long as an
author uses any XML-based language according to spec, they will have
provided all info according to the infoset and therefore the UA will have
the info needed to satisfy provisions 1 and 2. Provision 3 says, "If the
user can modify the state or value of a piece of HTML or XML content
through the user interface (e.g., by checking a box or editing a text
area), allow programmatic read access to the current state or value, and
allow the same degree of write access programmatically as is available
through the user interface." Here, the author needs to provide state or
value information if the user agent is unable to determine state or
value.  It seems that the DHTML roadmap is helping ensure, "allow the same
degree of write access programmatically as is available through the user
interface" but I'm not sure what that means for the author."


My reading of this is that html and xml user agents will provide this 
support automatically, but someone with better understanding of those user 
agents should confirm.



[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-gl/2005AprJun/0162.html

Received on Friday, 13 May 2005 01:12:06 UTC