Re: Screen-reader behaviour

At 10:48 -0400 UTC, on 2007-09-02, Al Gilman wrote:

> To: public-html@w3.org, wai-xtech@w3.org
> At 3:58 AM +0200 31 08 2007, Sander Tekelenburg wrote:
>>[Note: Reply-To set to <public-html@w3.org>, as suggested by Chaals, so as
not to flood <wai-xtech@w3.org>]

(I'll take this to mean that the flood is apprecxiated after all ;))

>>At 13:18 -0400 UTC, on 2007-08-30, Al Gilman wrote:

[...]

>>Are you saying you have input from real actual flesh and blood developers of
>>Jaws and such?
>
> Yes.
>
>>Can you get them to participate in the HTML WG?
>
> I seriously doubt it.

Why? Why would a HTML UA be unwilling to contribute to HTML5?

>>The theory is
>>important, but without input from the practice side, we aren't going to get
>>anywhere.
>
> I'm sorry, the accessibility APIs are practice

Sure, but what does authoring HTML (with universality and accessibility in
mind) have to do with OSs' accessibility APIs? We're trying to improve HTML
such that it becomes easier and more attractive to authors to produce content
that provides universality and accessibility.

[...]

>>What Gregory just explained about Jaws 8 looks even more horrible
>>than what I'd seen of it (Jaws 4). We need to know why Jaws is so horrible,
>>or else we can't do much for it.

[...]

> 2) Blaming Jaws is not scientific problem isolation. [...]

I am not blaming Jaws. I said that Jaws looks worse than I even thought, and
that I very much want to know *why* that is; what obstacles developers of
such tools run into, so that we can start to try to remove such obstacles
from HTML5.

So I was in fact asking *who/what is to blame*. If we don't know what the
problems are, how can we fix them?

> One major source is indeed the lack
> of a spec they can code to that actually reflects the main corpus of
> web content. The plans in HTML5 to create a concrete and pragmatic
> parse spec will radically improve this.

Right. Clear. (Well, that is, this relates only to those UAs that parse HTML
themselves. AFAIK Jaws relies on other UAs to do that for it.)

[...]

> 3) We not only have AT vendors talking to us, we have them
> implementing WAI-ARIA so that very-lightly-improved coding practice
> in Web Applications will create function available through AT which
> is presently outright unavailable.  This is our response to "solve
> real problems."

And WAI-ARIA looks, at first glance, real useful. But from what I've read of
it, it appears to be only about intentionally javascript-dependant sites (or
"DHTML, Ajax, Web 2.0", if you prefer fancier terminology). In the mean time,
we're still stuck with much more basic problems like @alt, @longdesc,
@summary, @headers, @scope, <img>, <object>, <embed>, aural CSS, etc.


-- 
Sander Tekelenburg
The Web Repair Initiative: <http://webrepair.org/>

Received on Sunday, 2 September 2007 23:58:36 UTC