Re: Access Accessibility information from JavaScript

a bit of a parable.  in the early days of railroading in the USA each 
railroad set a distance between the track or guage that they would use. 
each comparny often would pick a different guage to prevent othter 
railroad cars from running on their track. during the American civil war 
the USA general Herman Haupt decided on a standard guage for all military 
operations and it was a guage most often used in the North.

after the war many many dollars were spent reguaging railroads all over 
the USA to this standard guage. (1435mm)  even to this day there are still 
three major "standard" guages used in the world and a number of lesser 
ones.

how does this fit.   in the computer world when computers were a new toy 
and everybody had thier own idea of how to do things there were many 
different OS.   it didn't take a war but it has shaken out to three major 
standard OS's in use in the world  Windows, Mac, Unix/linux based systems.
since they have no reason to cooperate and are in direct competition with 
each other for money and market shore.
there so far has been no computer war but there is no incentive for the OS 
to work together.  our job at W3C/WAI would be so much easier if it were a 
single OS set as standard. but (most)  governments cannot favor one 
company over the other it can only say it has to work no matter what OS.

thus the problems with Javascript, PDF and so many other great apps that 
will work fine in one OS and totally bog down in annother if it works at 
all.

even cross platform attempts like OpenOffice.org have had limited success. 
until we can get competing companies to see the benefits of cross platform 
utilization this will continue.
many I know who use adaptive equipment say the internet gets harder and 
harder to use daily.

this is a long winded explanation of the problem. and unforhtunately I 
don't have an answer and we as a group and individually strive to force 
this round peg into the square hole almost daily.

good luck
Bob




On Sat, 23 Jul 2016, [UTF-8] Léonie Watson wrote:

> Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2016 16:38:04 +0100
> From: "[UTF-8] Léonie Watson" <tink@tink.uk>
> To: Tobias Bengfort <tobias.bengfort@posteo.de>, WAI IG <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
> Subject: Re: Access Accessibility information from JavaScript
> Resent-Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2016 15:38:38 +0000
> Resent-From: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
> 
> On 23/07/2016 13:27, Tobias Bengfort wrote:
>> 
>> I just realized that there is no JavaScript API to access accessibility
>> information. I am focusing on the role, but this probably also applies
>> to other topics.
>
> [...]
>
>> I cannot be the first person thinking about this. Is there any prior
>> discussion that explains why this is not included in any spec? Or is
>> there a spec that I missed?
>
> It is not a simple thing, not least because of the differences between all 
> the platform accessibility APIs. Thought has been put into this by various 
> people though, notably at Microsoft and Mozilla. There is a proposal to bring 
> together the good bits from Microsoft's WAPA, Mozilla's Web Accessibility API 
> project, and other places like IndieUI, to create script based accessibility. 
> More info here:
> https://discourse.wicg.io/t/script-based-accessibility-for-web-applications/1112 
>
>
>
> Hth
> Léonie.
>
>
> -- 
> @LeonieWatson tink.uk Carpe diem
>
>