Re: Accessible road maps

Can you explain to me why we NEED scripting?

Before you answer, eliminate all the scripts that can be handled in an
otherwise accessible manner.  I mean the two major reasons that I know of
for scripting are rollovers (can be done much nicer with CSS) and
showing/hiding text/images/links which are a major accessibility disaster.

So, what am I missing here?  why do we need scripts?

-Steve

Matt May said:
>
> On May 29, 2004, at 1:52 AM, David Woolley wrote:
>>> Just a quick sanity check - moving forward, the requirement to work
>>> WITHOUT JAVASCRIPT is going away in 2.0, right?  And being replaced
>>> with
>>
>> I hope not, as an increasing number of people who wouldn't consider
>> themselves disabled will refuse to run scripting, especially from
>> sites run by people unfamiliar to them.
>
> Please be careful with this approach: you're saying that we need to
> craft accessibility guidelines in order to satisfy needs that are
> orthogonal to disability. These things are out of our scope, and
> they're the kind of things that would cause the document to be ignored.
>
> Scripting and binary objects are accessibility issues on the Web; they
> also exist on over 85% of sites currently in existence. We ignore this
> fact at our peril.
>
> So, what do we do? Banish scripting from the Web? Certainly not. We may
> as well have banned tables and frames at the time they came out for all
> the damage they've done. But it wouldn't have made a bit of difference
> to developers who saw a tool that met their needs.
>
> The approach to solving this is threefold: create techniques and
> scripts that do minimal harm; get developers to use them, and
> understand how they work; and develop specifications that eliminate the
> need for scripting by replacing its most common use cases with
> declarative code.
>
> Which is what we're doing, actually. I'll be starting work on scripting
> techniques for WCAG 2. The end product will consist of techniques for
> keeping JavaScript from causing accessibility problems, and producing
> scripts that authors can take and use freely. I have several expert
> scripters who have expressed interest in working on this, and welcome
> more.
>
> Today, I'm on my way to a W3C Workshop on Web Applications and Compound
> Documents[1]. The Protocols and Formats WG position paper[2] explains
> how we got into the mess we're in, and our ideas on a way out. Other
> papers[3], at least all of those that I've read, say the same thing:
> declarative code cancels out scripting, and we need declarative
> languages to build these user interfaces we've been building all these
> years with script. This is good news for us, because it could clear out
> a lot of the weeds associated with scripting. The PFWG is also working
> on using currently available technologies to ensure that ATs can all
> interact with modern Web documents and applications.
>
> We have to take this on. There is no alternative. Script is here to
> stay, and if the WCAG document fails to recognize it, it will fail to
> be adopted.
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/2004/04/webapps-cdf-ws/index.html
> [2] http://www.w3.org/2004/04/wa-access.html
> [3] http://www.w3.org/2004/04/webapps-cdf-ws/papers/
>
> -
> m

Received on Monday, 31 May 2004 21:36:59 UTC