Re: User Agent Accessibility Guidelines

Hi Ian,

> I'm surprised that you say that since we have considered software
> other than IE and NN and other platforms as well (I'm a Linux user,
> for one, and our colleagues use Lynx, Amaya, Opera, Home Page
> Reader, PWWebSpeak, Jaws, and other tools.)

The point I was trying to make is that many points seem to have been
written to match existing browsers. I didn't find much that made me
think "hey, that's a good new idea, future browsers should have
that". While it is (at least to me) obvious that it cannot be true
that for instance the standard bookmark system (which has been
practically unchanged since browser first appeared on the planet) is
something to be very proud of.

Anyhow, maybe it was not the goal of WAI to think of new solutions.

> What specifically do you think we're asking developers to control that
> we shouldn't?

Well, point 1.3 and 1.4 seem to be requests that should be targetted
at distribution builders, rather than application developers. 

> To what problems do you refer? I would be very interested to 
> hear when access through the keyboard is not a good idea. I do
> almost everything I need with my keyboard in emacs.

There are two issues here: 1. do all mouse-driven manipulations have a
useful keyboard equivalent and 2. is it a good idea to drive software
by simulating keyboard events. For the first one, I think that there
are definitely things that don't make much sense when done through the
keyboard (drag and drop, for instance). As far as the second point is
concerned, I think that the proper way to drive software by external
means is to expose an API to the outside world. Granted, you list that
somewhere else too (`make the browser scriptable', or something along
those lines).

> Yikes! My name is even on the HTML portion of that one!

Sorry for that. The DOM standard is a collection of `hack upon hack'
that keeps growing without a proper design underneath. It is just no
fun to implement something like that (and as a result, I doubt that
Mnemonic will ever support it, at least not if I have to write the
code).

(we can discuss this somewhere else if you want, it's a bit
off-topic).

> I'd be happy to call you and talk if you have the time.

I prefer email. If you want to discuss things 1-1 that's fine too.

Best,
Kasper

Received on Friday, 1 October 1999 06:50:57 UTC