- From: Sailesh Panchang <sailesh.panchang@deque.com>
- Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2006 11:36:05 -0400
- To: <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
>I don't believe that "accessibility is impossible for Web sites that use >real AJAX". I don't even believe that WCAG 1.0 conformance is impossible. Well are there any specific techniques to demonstrate your belief? Please can you direct me to these? Markup languages allow one to use an alt attribute to make an image accessible or explicitly associate a label to make a form control accessible. But are there similar techniques available in the markup and scripting languages in use today to make AJAX and DHTML applications accessible? Finally more than a theoretical discussion, what matters is, do they work with today's user agents and assistive technologies? I think even workarounds and hacks cannot be completely effective because: "Unfortunately, HTML and other markup does not provide adequate markup to support accessible dynamic content.... HTML, when combined with script and CSS may be repurposed to create dynamic custom components without the ability for the author to convey this information to the native accessibility architectures designed to support dynamic GUI content.... JavaScript also make extensive use of tag elements such as DIVs where they will dynamically apply a UI through the use of style sheets and dynamic content changes. An HTML DIV provides no semantic information. The page author may define a DIV as the start of a pop-up menu or even an ordered list. No HTML facility provides a mechanism for the page author cannot convey the role of the DIV as being a pop-up menu. Consequently, a page author cannot tell an assistive technology when these elements have focus. There is no mechanism to convey accessibility property information as to whether the pop-up menu is collapsed or expanded. There is also no mechanism to define what the actions are that can be formed on the element other than through a device-dependent means through the event handler type (onmouseover, onclick, etc.)" [1] 1. http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/roadmap/DHTMLRoadmap040506.html 2. http://www.webaim.org/techniques/ajax/ Sailesh Panchang Senior Accessibility Engineer Deque Systems Inc. (www.deque.com) 11180 Sunrise Valley Drive, Suite #400, Reston VA 20191 Phone: 703-225-0380 (ext 105) E-mail: sailesh.panchang@deque.com
Received on Thursday, 20 July 2006 15:35:54 UTC