Re: Commands and Accessibility

Firstly, note that the original of this and another one that I've just 
replied to were incorrectly CCed to the list bounce address.  I've 
copied the mistake on those two :-(.

Peter Thiessen wrote:
> 
> Interesting, could you elaborate on “ Standards like ARIA try to get 
> round this, but I can't imagine it will be much used in the cases that 
> really need it.”?  Which cases would these be? I’ve found ARIA to be 
> quite extensible but only in a small domain.

My knowledge of ARIA is currently second hand, and I am a consumer with
knowledge of HTML internals, rather than a professional creator of HTML.

However, as I understood it, one of the main purposes of ARIA was to
identify what a control would be if a document were written in true
semantic HTML, rather than using HTML to produce a particular "user
experience" (of the author dictated kind) - e.g. if a link acts as a
command, ARIA would mark it as a button.  As such, it would be most
important in highly designed web sites, but my suspicion is that the
designers of such sites would be the least likely to care about the
semantics, and I think are often very visual people who would have
difficulty describing the semantics.


-- 
David Woolley
Emails are not formal business letters, whatever businesses may want.
RFC1855 says there should be an address here, but, in a world of spam,
that is no longer good advice, as archive address hiding may not work.

Received on Thursday, 21 August 2008 22:14:32 UTC