- From: Jim Jewett <jimjjewett@gmail.com>
- Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2007 14:20:20 -0400
- To: www-svg@w3.org, public-html@w3.org, public-xhtml2@w3.org, w3c-wai-pf@w3.org, w3c-html-cg@w3.org
- Cc: www-html-editor@w3.org
(Just realized this should probably be x-posted as well)
Anne van Kesteren <annevk@opera.com> wrote:
> If HTML5 were to be supported
> by all vendors ARIA would not even be needed.
Could you explain that?
I used the support pages of two screen-reader vendors to ask if there
was anything a new HTML spec could do to make their lives easier. The
answer was "No." My understanding of the reason is:
The Assistive Technology Vendors are *not*
interested in ever even seeing the HTML.
They screen-scrape whatever Application X
has put on the screen.
They also use accessibility APIs exposed by the operating system,
because these APIs are common across applications. They *might*
special case MSIE or even Firefox as an "important" application, but
they really don't want to.
Realistically, they don't even want to support ARIA directly, any more
than they want to separately support the "OS-level" APIs for MS
Windows, Apple, GTK, and KDE. (But they probably will, if ARIA gets
used in more than just web browsers, so that it could be seen as a
cross-OS API.)
The value of ARIA is that it lets MSIE (or firefox or Opera or
MyKoolProgram) make better use of those OS-level accessibility APIs
that they are already supporting.
If the html (or svg or xhtml2, etc) spec simply states:
Attribute names starting with "aria-" are
reserved for use by the ARIA specification.
These are typically used to improve accessibility.
...
role attribute values starting with "aria-" are
reserved for use by the ARIA specification.
These are typically used to improve accessibility.
I think that will cover it.
-jJ
Received on Wednesday, 24 October 2007 18:20:31 UTC