On 22/09/14 12:43, Henri Sivonen wrote: > On Sun, Sep 21, 2014 at 4:00 PM, James Graham <ja...@hoppipolla.co.uk> wrote:
>> leaving the remaining participants to debate topics of >> little consequence. > > FWIW, this bit is being spun into Twitter propaganda about Mozilla not > caring about accessibility, so it might be worthwhile to be careful > with the phrasing. Maybe I should address the question of accessibility directly. I think that accessibility is very important, and that of all the things that have suffered from the HTML specification schism it is by far the most significant. A situation where web technologies are largely being developed in one location, before being slightly rewritten to add or change a11y features by a different set of people in a different location seems likely to result in a poor outcome for users that depend on these features. Therefore it seems like we should be actively working to fix this divide. In the short term, if we are using the W3C version of the spec when we implement a11y support, we should ensure that any substantive differences that affect our implementation are backported to the WHATWG version. I understand that Hixie is not held in high esteem by everyone working in a11y, but he has committed to defer to implementations if they agree on a common behaviour, whatever his personal feelings, and I see no reason he should renege on that promise. In the long term, I don't know what the solution is. There is clearly a cultural divide that we have failed to bridge. It's unclear how to examine that history without stirring bad feelings on both sides. At the least I suggest not trying to hold this discussion via Twitter; it is not a medium not known for subtlety or nuance. Without these it is easy to preach to the choir but hard to win over doubters. I don't think this discussion has much direct bearing on the HTML5 PR, although it does indicate that we are actively implementing technologies from the W3C specification. _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
