multimodal labels and trees too far away for XForms? [was: Re: Deploying (accessible) XForms today?]

I noticed this bit had slipped under my attention level:

John Boyer ha scritto:
> For what it's worth though, I do think that XForms would benefit from
> being able to set an accessibility
> message that is more comprehensive than the 'label', which also
> typically drives visual presentation.

I thought 'label' was multimodal enough already and that it was just a matter of stylesheet used by processor. If what you say is correct then it seems that XForms failed WRT accessibility and if it is not correct it seems that at least you think it did.

> The issue is that sighted users have two dimensions of information
> available, so we want a way to
> maintain that high-fidelity experience with a one dimensional
> information stream.  This is a capability
> you can exercise now with XFDL+XForms, 

What do you mean 'now'? Are you referring to this quite obscure W3C note you coauthored in 1998? It's not what Tim Bray is commonly remembered for...

http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-XFDL

I thought XForms development had spawned also off it [1] and eventually made it obsolete, or? Is it that XForms needs bits from that largely overlapping and pre-xml-namespaces note in order to acheive its declared multimodal accessibility goal and selling point? Who else other than you is using such an approach or even agreeing on this?

I find it a funny pattern that vendor-specific specs, together with (only sometimes so dear) multimodal accessibility itself, are used as an argument by the WG for putting off discussion about issues still left open in XForms, see for example this one:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-forms/2005Mar/0005.html

Whatever happened to trees in XForms? What is the status? When is it foreseeable to have them discussed so that there is a chance of tackling the hard issues about them? Sooner or later than multimodal labels?

Are multimodal accessibility in general and multimodal tree and label controls in particular still considered to be too far away as a goal by the XForms WG?

ciao
ste

[1] http://www.xml.com/cs/user/view/cs_msg/319

Received on Saturday, 6 May 2006 13:51:00 UTC