OpenSocial, ARIA and accessibility

Hi folks

Has anyone here taken a look at the accessibility of OpenSocial [1]; 
it's a platform from Google and their friends for portable social apps 
(widgets/gadgets) that can be embedded in 'container' Websites, 
typically "social network" sites.

The specs make fairly heavy use of Javascript, and are naturally quite 
complex to navigate since a page typically contains a number of embedded 
applications. I believe iframes may sometimes be used to wrap each 
app/widget, though Caja (secured javascript) also has some role. Perhaps 
Kevin (cc:'d) can elaborate; I'm not sure quite where the specs stop, 
and the leading opensource implementation (Apache Shindig, see [3]).

I have some dim awareness of the ARIA work [2] on Ajax etc 
accessibility, but no knowledge of details. My guess is that we could 
have useful discussions both about the accessibility of the Opensocial 
container standard, the Apache shindig implementation, and in addition, 
accessibility techniques for individual widgets. But I'm out of my depth 
already, so will end here. It would be nice if OpenSocial could get some 
accessibility review before things get too settled. At the moment it 
seems that the effort is still moving fast and has some flexibility...

Thanks for any thought,

cheers,

Dan



[1] http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/
[2] http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/aria
     http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Accessible_DHTML
[3] http://incubator.apache.org/projects/shindig.html

Received on Monday, 4 February 2008 01:12:56 UTC