RE: HTML5 DL Element vs. WCAG 2.0 Success Criteria

Of course we should report bugs to the AT vendors. But should we then publish code that we know will give an inferior user experience until the bugs are fixed? I think not.

Presumably few people would argue against conducting user testing with fully able participants and making whatever changes are necessary to optimise the user experience. You would make the changes even if the initial code was valid and semantically correct.

Presumably few people would argue against conducting browser compatibility testing and making whatever changes are necessary so the website works correctly in all the browsers you want to support, even if this means modifying valid and semantically correct code to work around known browser bugs.

So why is there so much opposition to optimising the user experience with assistive technologies?

Steve Green

From: Steve Faulkner [mailto:faulkner.steve@gmail.com]
Sent: 07 February 2014 19:27
To: Steve Green
Cc: WAI Interest Group
Subject: Re: HTML5 DL Element vs. WCAG 2.0 Success Criteria


On 7 February 2014 19:11, Steve Green <steve.green@testpartners.co.uk<mailto:steve.green@testpartners.co.uk>> wrote:
Some might argue that using so-called 'correct' semantics will somehow encourage AT vendors to improve their products at some indeterminate point in the future, but the cost is an impaired user experience for some people right now.

no, what will cause AT vendors to improve their products is people filing bugs and providing clear advice via web standards .
For example JAWS implemented support for HTML5 section element such that that start and end of each instance was announced. This caused a degraded users experience. JAWS was implementing as per the HTML specification, but it was unclear what the expected behaviour should be. This was remedied in the specification with the addition of the following text:

"Note: It is strongly  recommended that user agents such as screen readers only convey the presence of, and provide navigation for section elements, when the section element has an accessible name."
http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/dom.html#sec-implicit-aria-semantics
along with this people wrote articles and filed bugs with freedom scientific, this resulted in a fix for the issue in the latest JAWS 15 hot fix.



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Regards

SteveF
HTML 5.1<http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/>