RE: Canvas and ARIA alternatives

Apologies if this is obvious to others but could somebody please explain to
me why anyone would choose to use the canvas element to handle user input
over the designated input elements? Have I missed something?
 
I appreciate that designers tend to have a disproportionate influence over
user interfaces and understandably so. And I understand that this in
conjunction with advances in technology has driven the development of a
miriad of custom widgets which has then required additional support through
ARIA for accessibility purposes. But this just seems unnecessary to me and
is only going to lead to increased complexity and reduced accessibility in
my view.

I'm all for freedom to be creative up to a point but surely there's a time
when somebody has to push back on the basis that if such approaches are to
be adopted, accessibility is going to be significantly compromised.

As far as I was aware, one of the prime directives of  "the web" is to give
everyone equal opportunity to access information and I feel at some point
this goal needs to be placed front and centre if it is ever going to be
realised.
 

Cheers
Ian
 

  

-----Original Message-----
From: Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis [mailto:bhawkeslewis@googlemail.com] 
Sent: 31 July 2012 20:55
To: Jonathan Avila
Cc: WAI Interest Group
Subject: Re: Canvas and ARIA alternatives

On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 6:11 PM, Jonathan Avila <jon.avila@ssbbartgroup.com>
wrote:
> The proper way to provide an equivalent to canvas content is to use 
> fallback content that is a descendant of the canvas element.  Lately I 
> have seen authors applying ARIA markup including roles, aria-labels, 
> title attributes, and alt attributes directly to canvas elements.

Do you have any examples of the use of @alt on <canvas>? It's the only usage
you mention that would be definitely incorrect.

> What are peoples thoughts on the canvas element and ARIA.

How "canvas" is backed by accessibility structures, including ARIA annotated
HTML, is a matter of active work at a spec level.

See for example:

http://www.w3.org/html/wg/tracker/issues/201

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis

Received on Tuesday, 31 July 2012 21:38:33 UTC