Two limitations I've found for web accessibility on the Mac.
1. Firefox has bugs in reading keycodes so trying to make keyboard
shortcuts for Firefox on the Mac is not possible. They claim to have
fixed the bug but it's part of the FF3 release, which will be a while.
2. Safari doesn't allow tabindex="-1" or focusing on non-form elements
or non-links. Widgets today are made up of spans, divs, lis and other
markup. FF and IE both allow focusing on these items if there is a
tabindex set. Safari does not. So when I Ajax in new content into a div
on a page I move focus there and the screen reader reads it. This fails
on Safari and there really is no way to notify somebody that there is
new content.
CB
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis wrote:
Richard Gardenhire wrote:
Does anyone have the address to write to the Web Consortium, so that
concerns can be expressed?
Sorry, I'm confused. What concerns, exactly? What are you trying to
achieve by writing to them?
There are many different ways for individuals to interact with the
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which has a whole range of different
activities, only one of which is accessibility focused (the Web
Accessibility Initiative). Writing to a generic contact email address
at the Consortium is unlikely to be an especially effective course of
action. Usually people raise issues on an appropriate public
Consortium mailing list, having checked to see that the issue hasn't
already been raised and dealt with before.
Here's W3C's contact page:
http://www.w3.org/Consortium/contact
And here's the public W3C mailing list index:
http://lists.w3.org/
And here's the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative homepage:
http://www.w3.org/WAI/
I find that most of the web designs are not the fault of Apple's, but
rather, in the design of the website.
Perhaps. But I think some of WebKit's deficiencies mean that good
designs don't work well and that bad designs (which are indeed common)
aren't dealt with as well as they could be.
Is this what you meant by the web bug tracker, or is this two
different situations altogether?
I wasn't talking about the "web bug tracker" (there's no such thing),
but rather about the "WebKit bug tracker". WebKit (that's Web plus Kit
as one word) is a open source web rendering engine. For an explanation
of what that means, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layout_engine
The WebKit engine underpins browsers such as OmniWeb and Shiira but
also other HTML-consuming applications such as Apple Mail and
Colloquy. Most relevantly here, it is the engine that Safari uses. For
an introduction to WebKit, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit
The WebKit bug tracker is a bug tracker specifically for the WebKit
rendering engine:
http://bugs.webkit.org/
Hope that explains things a bit better, but don't hesitate to ask for
clarification if you don't find it at the links provided above.
--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
