Repair of Pointer Based Events

Al and PF,
The User Agent working group has had a long standing requirement for the 
user to interact with active elements in a device independent way.  In 
recent teleconferences we have been considering removing the requirement to 
provide keyboard access to mouse based event handlers (onMouseOver, 
onMouseOut, onClick) that are explicitly associated with an element as part 
of the minimum requirement for conformance to UAAG.

The reasons for reducing the requirement for active elements:
1. We do not have any implementation experience for this feature.

2. Without implementation experience we do not know how the inclusion of 
the feature will affect accessibility

3. This is a repair requirement for poor authoring practices and including 
the requirement will continue to support poor authoring practices

4. In general other repair requirements are a lower priority in UAAG

5. Without implementation experience we may need to go to Candidate 
Recommendation until implementation shows a P1 benefit, delaying 
publication of current requirements.


The reasons to maintain requirement:
1. It is an important accessibility problem and that User Agent needs to 
require the repair

My question to the PF working group is do you agree with the reasons for 
reducing the requirement to eliminate support for pointer based events as 
part of the minimum requirement for conformance, or do you think that this 
is such an important problem that we should include, even though we do not 
have any implementation expereince?

Thanks,
Jon
Jon Gunderson, Ph.D., ATP
Coordinator of Assistive Communication and Information Technology
Division of Rehabilitation - Education Services
MC-574
College of Applied Life Studies
University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign
1207 S. Oak Street, Champaign, IL  61820

Voice: (217) 244-5870
Fax: (217) 333-0248

E-mail: jongund@uiuc.edu

WWW: http://www.staff.uiuc.edu/~jongund
WWW: http://www.w3.org/wai/ua

Received on Friday, 9 February 2001 14:46:46 UTC