- From: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>
- Date: Wed, 02 Sep 2009 12:38:10 -0700
- To: David Bolter <david.bolter@gmail.com>
- Cc: Steven Faulkner <faulkner.steve@gmail.com>, HTMLWG WG <public-html@w3.org>, W3C WAI-XTECH <wai-xtech@w3.org>
On Sep 2, 2009, at 7:51 AM, David Bolter wrote: > On 02/09/09 5:57 AM, Maciej Stachowiak wrote: >> >> 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. > > We do this in Firefox as well. We look at native markup and ARIA, > and ultimately what gets exposed to platform API is based on > heuristics. Maciej, it would be great to have you or someone else > from Apple involved in our efforts to make sure we use similar > heuristics. Please see: http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/aria-ua-task-force > > We're trying to make this all work with the least amount of pain for > AT and web developers. I don't have the bandwidth for this, but I do regularly encourage anyone at Apple who is working on ARIA to participate, as their time permits. Regards, Maciej
Received on Wednesday, 2 September 2009 19:38:55 UTC