Re: User Agent Accessibility Guidelines

Hi Kasper!
I want to weigh in here because drag and drop caught my ear and I'd
also like to invite you Kasper to our telecon next week if I am not
preempting the chair and ian to do so .  About drag and drop.  You
must consider a hard fact of life.  I am a user who couldn't mouse
drag and drop if you spoon fed it to me.  I can however quite
successfully drag and drop through the keyboard.  While this may seem
to be a bit of a stray off the topic of our discussion, it illustrates
a point that actually supports the contention from which you would
have us shy. in applications that implement successfull strategies to
carry out mouse functions via keyboard, menus reflect the graphical
options such as for in addition to drag and drop, there is copy cut
and paste.  and also some ordering menus such as the codeks in the
audio driver portion of the windows.98 controll pannel allow you to
arange them with the words up and down to simulate clicking on so you
have drag and drop through the keyboard.  It is elligantly doable and
wall we are saying at the end here is that any browser that seeks to
become accessible should make it possible for the assistive technology
to deliver the goods by providing them through a standard interface
which as you say they already do.  Some do not and there are still
functions as you will see in gregorie's review of the guidelines using
a screen reader point out.  I will be publishing a similar review
soon.
Thanks!
Kasper Peeters wrote:
> 
> 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
 
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Received on Friday, 1 October 1999 07:26:42 UTC