On 8/7/07, zwetan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > and then I found that http://www.joedolson.com/articles/2007/02/are-accessibility-sites-fatally-flawed/ > > and I realized that i was just losing my time trying to argument with an "universalist"
I think that's misrepresenting me somewhat. I'm not a universalist in that sense: when I talk about "web accessibility", I'm talking about web accessibility to people with disabilities, not radical interoperability, backwards compatibility, text browser support, and support for deeply flawed user agents like Internet Explorer /per se/. Those are important issues in their own right of course, but IMHO it doesn't help to conflate them or equate them automatically with issues of disabled access that shade into discrimination. Read Isofarro's excellent essay against the universalist mindset: http://www.isolani.co.uk/blog/access/BarCampLondon2AccessibilityPanelThoughts One of the important concepts he develops is one of "contracts" between developers and platforms. Platforms offer accessibility features, developers use them and that's where the developer's responsibility ultimately end. So for example, developers use Flash accessibility features and it's up to Flash players to actually implement them. But the same logic applies to Adobe's development of software on the Mac, on Linux, and for Firefox. Adobe is culpable for failing to use the accessibility features provided by those platforms in its software. (There may of course be technical reasons why that would have been impossible, but if so I haven't seen them discussed anywhere. It's especially hard to imagine what technical limitations there would be in Firefox's case; it's certainly left Firefox developers baffled.) Adobe's work in this area seems to have stagnated since Bob Regan's great whitepaper on /Best Practices in Accessible Flash/ way back in August 2005, which discussed other platforms thus: > While there have been recent improvements to the Apple Macintosh OS > 10.4 release (Tiger), including a built in screen reader called VoiceOver, the > Flash Player does not support this screen reader. All accessible Flash content > must be tested using Microsoft Internet Explorer. At the time of publishing > this document, Internet Explorer was still the only accessible browser > available. > > The Mozilla Project has made some improvements with the Firefox > Browser, and support for screen readers will soon be available. However, the > version of the Flash Player that runs in Firefox is not yet accessible. > Designers often question the wisdom of testing accessible content using only > one browser and one platform. While the future of cross platform and cross > browser accessibility looks promising (with the recent improvements at Apple > and Mozilla), the reality is that today, people with disabilities are almost > exclusively restricted to using Windows with Internet Explorer. http://urlx.org/adobe.com/68dfe [PDF format] Flash inaccessibility on other platforms deepens those restrictions. Now (and this is where my position on Flash may superficially appear universalist although actually I don't think it is) I do recognize that people with disabilities require access to mobile technologies and benefit from access to alternative platforms, based on what they themselves say. For example, Linux is cheap and allows people with disabilities to get involved with the development of their entire software environment and VoiceOver users get a lot of "automatically" accessible applications thanks to a close coupling of the Apple Accessibility API and the Cocoa widget set. The right technology to enable screen reader access to Flash currently (Internet Explorer and an expensive Windows screen reader) is not necessarily the best technology choice for users generally. Because of the licensing of the Flash spec, it's not realistically the fault of Apple or GNOME if their platforms offer poor Flash accessibility. (Whereas it /is/ ultimately their responsibility if they offer poor HTML, PDF, or ODF accessibility.) Here again, I can't understand how this is up to anybody but Adobe. > which obviously has an agenda against Adobe and Flash and enjoy a little too > much contrcuting a big controversy abotu a sensitive topic such as > accessibility (cf a troll defintion > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll ). Actually, I have no particular beef with Adobe beyond the damage I think they do the Flash platform and web accessibility through the licensing of the Flash specification and the inaccessibility of their Flash plugins and players on platforms other than Internet Explorer and Windows. It's a shame, because Flash seems to have a certain amount to offer in terms of making more accessible experiences (e.g. audio games, video captioning, perhaps rich interfaces for folks with learning disabilities, and widgets exposed to accessibility frameworks like MSAA). When I want an illustrative contrast with Flash and Adobe Flash Player, I happily turn to Adobe PDF, which is an open specification that has been used by other implementers to create screen reader accessible software (Apple Preview), and Adobe Reader, which is (at least) quasi-screen reader accessible on Windows, OS X, and Linux. I use Adobe software every day, and have even taken flak for pointing out to disgruntled screen reader users that Flash and PDF do have accessibility featuresets and that their problems with Flash and PDF content may stem from author error not the format itself. Hope that makes some sense and explains where I'm coming from a little better. :) Regards -- Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis _______________________________________________ osflash mailing list [email protected] http://osflash.org/mailman/listinfo/osflash_osflash.org
