Re: picking up on some comments in IRC on ARIA

hi maciej,

thanks for the clarification and yes i agree
regards
stevef
2009/9/2 Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>

>
> On Sep 2, 2009, at 2:47 AM, Steven Faulkner wrote:
>
>
>>
>> <othermaciej> I'm not sure a strict mapping to accessibility APIs makes
>> sense, because it would make it impossible to put any novel and clever
>> heuristics on the UA side instead of the AT side --
>> Can you explain this further? if the UI is not mapped to accessibility
>> APIs Assistive technology has to pull this info from the DOM, which is
>> something you suggested previously in the alt="" vs role="presentation"
>> discussion was not desirable for voiceover.
>>
>
> What I mean is, I don't think it makes sense to define a mandatory standard
> mapping to accessibility APIs for all possible HTML elements and attributes.
>
> I do think that browser should communicate with AT by mapping to
> accessibility APIs (and that's exclusively the way Safari/WebKit talks to
> VoiceOver).
>
> But the browser should be free to implement heuristics for poorly marked up
> content on the browser side, so the API mappings can't be mandated by spec.
> In particular, when using Safari with VoiceOver, some of the heuristics are
> implemented on the WebKit side before mapping to the accessibility API. That
> lets us put less browser-specific logic in VoiceOver. But to do that, we
> need freedom on how exactly we map particular markup to the accessibility
> API.
>
> Regards,
> Maciej
>



-- 
with regards

Steve Faulkner
Technical Director - TPG Europe
Director - Web Accessibility Tools Consortium

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