RE: WAI ARIA on mobile

Two things:
1. S60 and Safari, which are the only two fully accessible browsers on
Nokia and IPhone platforms do not yet support ARIA landmarks because
they are not exposed by the Webkit, an engine that powers both browsers.
Neither IPhone's Voiceover nor Nokia's Talks and Mobilespeak understand
ARIA landmarks even if they were available.

Regards,
Victor



-----Original Message-----
From: wai-xtech-request@w3.org [mailto:wai-xtech-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Boland Jr., Frederick E.
Sent: Tuesday, July 21, 2009 1:11 PM
To: w3c-wai-pf@w3.org
Cc: wai-xtech@w3.org
Subject: FW: WAI ARIA on mobile

Fyi for consideration and discussion
Best, Tim Boland NIST

-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Phil Archer
Sent: Tuesday, July 21, 2009 4:27 AM
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Cc: Shawn Henry; Henny Swan
Subject: WAI ARIA on mobile

Greetings from Mobile Land...

One of the participants in our Introduction to W3C Mobile Web Best
Practices course [1], Jeff Van Campen of the London Web Standards Group
[2], raised this issue on the discussion forum. As that forum isn't
public, I'm copying his mail here as I don't know the answer and I'm
interested to know!

=== Jeff's message begins===

I was at WordCamp UK over the weekend (along with fellow Mobile Best
Practice students Laura Kalbag and Gicela Morales).

As a part of a hacking session Laura, myself and a few other WordPresser
were looking at modifying Kubrick, the default WordPress theme, to work
in a mobile context.

One of the issues we ran into is that Kubrick includes WAI-ARIA roles as
of WordPress 2.8.

As we were working, we removed them, as this made validation easier.

I understand that WAI-ARIA isn't supported on any mobile browsers yet,
but I'd like to add them to the code for two reasons:

1. So that the code is future proof
2. So that they are discoverable by people examining the code, who may
not know about WAI-ARIA

That brings me to two questions:

1. Does anyone know of any issues with WAI-ARIA roles in existing mobile
browsers?
2. Is it likely that WAI-ARIA will be included as a module in a future
version of XHTML Basic?

=== ends ===


[1] http://www.w3.org/2009/03/mobitrain_course_description.html
[2] http://londonwebstandards.org/


--


Phil Archer
W3C Mobile Web Initiative
http://www.w3.org/Mobile

http://philarcher.org

Received on Tuesday, 21 July 2009 22:36:06 UTC