Encouraging the use of technologies designed to support accessibility

I think we should consider a carefully scoped proposal that in some circumstances requires the use of technologies which are specifically designed to enhance accessibility. We're seeing several of these, including ARIA, the ARIA Digital Publishing module, work on an ARIA extension for SVG (currently stalled), and the COGA personalization proposals, as well as the Accessibility Object Model (i.e., an accessibility API for the Web platform).

Roughly, the idea is that accessibility-enhancing Web technologies should be used, and used according to specification, where an accessibility-enhancing Web technology is defined to be a technology that

  *   Is used by user agents and assistive technologies to improve the accessibility of Web content.
  *   States explicitly in its specification that it is designed to improve accessibility for users with disabilities.
  *   Is designed to complement and to be compatible with the technologies that are used to implement the content (i.e., we aren't requiring the author to change their implementation technologies).
There may need to be an exception to address cases in which departure from specifications is necessary, and can be done in an interoperable fashion to work around bugs in user agents or assistive technologies.
Also, use of these technologies should only be required in circumstances in which their application makes sense, but it's hard to define what those conditions are, as they vary for each of the relevant technologies. The specifications are likely to indicate what the technologies should be used for, however.
Thus I'm not sure whether this proposal can be made reliably testable. It's much narrower than the WCAG 1.0 "use technologies according to specification" mandate, as it applies only to "accessibility-enhancing" technologies (markup languages, APIs, metadata formats, etc.). The "used according to specification" requirement is supposed to ensure that the technologies are used correctly and appropriately, in so far as these qualities are mandated by the specification.
In the "personalization" discussion today, the idea underlying this proposal attracted some interest, so I'm raising it here to enable others to consider wehther some version of it could be brought into shape for WCAG 2.1, for a subsequent 2.x release if there are any, or for Silver.


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