- From: Ramón Corominas <listas@ramoncorominas.com>
- Date: Wed, 01 Apr 2009 13:50:07 +0200
- To: Phill Jenkins <pjenkins@us.ibm.com>
- CC: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Hello again. > Thanks for sharing your opinion, but "enough" and "cost" is a policy > discussion in my pinion, not a technical software engineering discussion. > "Costs" and "enough" is only mentioned WCAG 2.0 (see Note 2) as one of 4 > choices (2d), but I do agree it should be part of the policy discussion. So let's see what are the "technical" choices you mention... "2. The Web content technology must have accessibility-supported user agents that are available to users. This means that at least one of the following four statements is true: a. The technology is supported natively in widely-distributed user agents that are also accessibility supported (such as HTML and CSS);" This is not -and as far as I know won't be- the case for Adobe PDF and Flash, since they require a plug-in or different application. In my opinion Adobe Reader itself (not the plug-in) can't be strictly considered as a true "user agent", since it does not *retrieve* web content, although I could accept Reader as a kind of external add-on to the user agent that renders /downloaded/ web content. It seems also that WAI-ARIA is been supported -more or less- by major browsers, but we should take in account the AT support for this technology, that (in my opinion) is very poor. "OR b. The technology is supported in a widely-distributed plug-in that is also accessibility supported;" (and I think we should implicitly add "and distributed in an accesible manner") This would then be the case for Flash and PDF. As Matt has stated, PDF seems to be well-supported in a wide variety of OS, user agents, and AT, so I suppose that if content is well-formed, we can safely accept PDF as an "accessibility supported" technology; anyway, I think we must still keep in mind that most of the users won't have the latest version of the OS, user agent or AT, so we will still be excluding people. But yes, technically right. In respect to Flash, I only can say that all "accessible" Flash content that I've been able to test only renders ok with some combinations of Windows + IE + JAWS, and inserted in a particular way in the HTML. Perhaps its real support is better than I can know and all content I've tested is badly done; this would be great news for me, so I could then accept Flash as "safe" and concentrate efforts in study and develop recommendations to generate good content. It would be nice if Adobe developed official Techniques for Flash and PDF to be included in the WCAG documents (perhaps they already exist somewhere?). My apologizes to Matt if it seemed that I rejected PDF, Flash, or any other technology as accessibility supported. It was my fault to mention specific technologies, since I'm only copying WCAG when they state that a technology must have support to be considered supported (very logical, I think). "OR c. The content is available in a closed environment, such as a university or corporate network, where the user agent required by the technology and used by the organization is also accessibility supported;" Not the case, since we are talking about general content in the World Wide Web. "OR d. The user agent(s) that support the technology are accessibility supported and are available for download or purchase in a way that: * does not cost a person with a disability any more than a person without a disability and * is as easy to find and obtain for a person with a disability as it is for a person without disabilities." So for widespread web content, any technology (no names here) that is only compatible with certain OS, user agent, and/or AT (not widely supported), we should not be punished for suffering a disability. Am I right in my interpretation now? Which technologies will you consider as "accessibility supported", then? Regards, Ramón.
Received on Wednesday, 1 April 2009 11:52:15 UTC