RE: 1.3.5 from Mark

My two cents:  I’m struggling with the use of non-standard and draft attributes to accomplish an SC.  I’ve argued myself in circles.  On one hand, we have our examples pages and sites so that we can demonstrate the positive effects of the SC, but on the other hand, I know we are going to have a lot of visitors go to the example pages to find out HOW it was done.

 

I’ve passed a page, I’ll not revisit that.  But here are questions I’ve been debating with myself:

 

Are we really succeeding at demonstrating that something is programmatically determinable by using non-standard attributes?  On one hand I argue no:  we are proving the opposite by having to rely on something that doesn’t exist.  On the other hand I can argue that we are demonstrating that something WILL be programmatically determinable through a standard means at some point.  On the third hand (I’m out of hands, let’s use my left foot) we are demonstrating that something is programmatically determinable right NOW by innovation and imagination, but on my right foot we are demonstrating that developers will have to rely on unique/innovative non-standard methods to meet the SC NOW.

 

Are we leading (setting beneficial SC with the promise that technology and standards will catch up) or are we following (using existing technology and standards that are available now to developers)?  I like to lead, but…

 

Are we ok with setting a standard that is currently challenging to meet?  Developers can meet the SC if they implement the same “non standard” techniques we used (or come up with their own), but does that scale?  I’d argue no.  If they meet the standard now with a lot of super-customized techniques they will have to re-engineer their work when other standards catch up.  A support nightmare.  I’d argue that this will hurt the cause of our desire to further the adoption of Accessibility.

 

Those are the arguments I am having with just myself!  I haven’t even engaged you guys yet.

 

Charles Adams

 

 

From: Alastair Campbell <acampbell@nomensa.com> 
Sent: Friday, March 30, 2018 11:38 AM
To: John Foliot <john.foliot@deque.com>
Cc: Chuck Adams <charles.adams@oracle.com>; Joshue O Connor - InterAccess <josh@interaccess.ie>; lisa.seeman <lisa.seeman@zoho.com>; w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
Subject: RE: 1.3.5 from Mark

 

Hi John,

 

I almost wrote a long email around the difference for AAA, how easy it is to swap one attribute for another, but thankfully we don’t need to go down that route.

 

Looking down the implementations, we have two (other) implementations for 1.3.5, so I’ll go back to the evaluations… once the kids are in bed.

 

Cheers,

 

-Alastair

 

 

From: John Foliot 

 

Hi Alastair, All,

 

> However, I’d rather have a discussion of “accessibility-support” after the immediate deadline.

 

I think I have to push back on this,