Re: SVGT 1.2 Comments and the need for accessibility techniques

Re: equivalent

Chaals, as you will know a number of people have championed the need  
for multi-media, symbolic, graphical and illustrated equivalents for  
text including the need for alternatives at different reading ages,  
and synopses, or executive summaries. Whilst this was adopted for a  
while, recently this approach seems to have been 'dropped' from WCAG 2.

Furthermore, there is a distinct possibility or indeed likelyhood  
that SVG might perform this important role.

I also wrote recently to Chris and yourself regarding this issue, but  
failed to receive any response. Also mentioning other relevant  
accessibility failings in SVG.

you wrote" I would like to see a couple of the examples of using non- 
device-independent events used, and an explanation given of what is  
wrong with them (such as the difficulty of understanding how they  
will actually work in environments where stylus-based or voice-based  
navigation is used)."

However in my opinion there is a need for a whole range of  
accessibility techniques, unfortunately Chris considers my expertise  
insufficient to warrant assistance.
n.b. http://www.peepo.co.uk maybe one of the first sites  
demonstrating tab key accessibility (firefox1.5)

best wishes

Jonathan Chetwynd
Accessible Solutions
http://www.eas-i.co.uk



On 6 Dec 2005, at 01:38, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:


On Sun, 04 Dec 2005 06:25:02 +1100, Scott Hayman <shayman@rim.com>  
wrote:

>> Appendix F - F.2
>
>> 1. It mentions a text equivalent, but I feel this should be more  
>> specific,
>> and go as far as stating that it should be the semantic meaning  
>> actually
>> conveyed by the shape or shape component.
>
>
> Unfortunately, this is not something that is covered in the User Agent
> Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 [1], the document we used to develop our
> accessibility guidelines and a document that we don't feel that we
> should go beyond.  Perhaps this is something that you can bring up  
> with
> the working group responsible for that document.

This concept of an "equivalent" (which is not necessarily simply  
text) comes from, and is clearly described in the way Will suggests  
in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines [1], which are now a  
relatively old, stable and established W3C Recommendation. I think  
that the requested change is merely editorial (i.e. it could be done  
after the publication of a Last Call draft, in the worst case,  
without requiring explicit comment) but that it should be made.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/#glossary

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile     +61 409 134 136     Opera Software
chaals@opera.com                             http://opera.com
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Received on Tuesday, 6 December 2005 07:03:01 UTC