Social Accessibility now supports WAI-ARIA [Fw: post to WAI-XTECH - applying WAI-ARIA to existing web application]

----- Forwarded by Aaron M Leventhal/Cambridge/IBM on 09/13/2008 01:37 PM 
-----

From:
Hironobu Takagi/Japan/IBM@IBMJP
To:
Aaron M Leventhal/Cambridge/IBM@IBMUS
Date:
09/13/2008 09:44 AM
Subject:
post to WAI-XTECH - applying WAI-ARIA to existing web application

Hi All, 

I'm Hiro, a tech lead of the Social Accessibility project, which aims at 
improving accessibility of any content on the net through collaborative 
authoring. 
Please refer the project page for more info. 
http://socialaccessibility.alphaworks.ibm.com/en/

Last week, we succeeded in supporting WAI-ARIA. It means that anyone can 
add WAI-ARIA metadata to any AJAX application on the net. 
We hope that you can use this tool to investigate the power of ARIA on 
existing Web applications 

As a first step, we added a function to create and attach live region 
metadata to any application. 
We tested with some sites. If you are interested in the external metadata 
approach for WAI-ARIA, please try following steps. 

1. Install bookmarklets 

The project now provides a bookmarklet to apply metadata. (If you are 
asked to sign in then please register an account or sign in as a guest 
without registration.) 
http://socialaccessibility.alphaworks.ibm.com/help/bookmarklets 

2. Access sample pages and run our bookmarklet on the page. ("Apply 
metadata (Social Accessibility bookmarklet)") 

We have prepared two sample pages. It is recommended to try it with 
FireVox. (we found small issues with other screen readers.) 
You can also check added metadata by using tools like Firebug. 

This is an example of a page "without" live region. 
http://accessibleajax.clcworld.net/suggested/live_missing.htm 

Access Gmail and "logout" from the service. In the page, there is a lively 
updated text to show free storage size. 
We added aria-live="polite" to the text. 
https://gmail.com/ 

3. Create live-region metadata 

Install our Firefox extension to create metadata. 
http://socialaccessibility.alphaworks.ibm.com/help/download_supporter 

Move to a target page, and then open left-side "Sidebar" or right-side 
"Pagemap", and follow the instruction. 
There is no mention about Live region in the instruction, but you can 
select "WAI-ARIA" or "Live region" from the pull down menu to select 
metadata type. 
http://socialaccessibility.alphaworks.ibm.com/help/sidebar_tutorial_basic 


We appreciate any comments and suggestion.

Thank you. 
Hiro 

---------------------
Hironobu Takagi, PhD.
Accessibility Research
Tokyo Research Laboratory, IBM Research
+81-46-215-4557
E-mail: takagih@jp.ibm.com