> > On 3/2/09 2:02 AM, "Mathew Robertson" <mat...@optusnet.com.au> wrote: > > Its been possible to do ARIA style accessibility since about 1995 - its just > > now that people are starting to care. > > Matt Morgan-May <matt...@adobe.com> wrote: > > Not sure what value you were hoping to add to the conversation, but MSAA, > the Windows accessibility API, didn't come out until April 1997. And that > much of what ARIA has to offer is actually enabled by the IAccessible2 or > User Interface Automation APIs, which are much more recent and > comprehensive. ARIA is a very ambitious spec, and a number of companies > contributing to its support in a very short period of time, relative to the > work that's necessary. > > But, thanks for the cynicism! We don't get enough of that on the Internet > these days. :)
:) It was definitly meant as a little cynisism... I did say "about 1995" - so I should have been more specific as to the actual year... so I'll expand my sentiment (it might be a little long-winded for some people...). Firstly, accessibilty is not *just* about being able to keystrokes, as its been possible to use braille devices in linux before 1995 (aka Win95 came out that year), using a serial console. Its not just about supporting disability, it also represents support for other languages, layouts, and so on. Indeed as someone quite bright wrote (I dont have a link), "making applications more accessible, helps not only those that specifically need that extra help, but also those that simply make use of those features". For example: to using a serial console for text display, has been available since the first mainframes existed -> so braille devices worked too. One would expect that new user interface paradigms could provide at least a similar equivalent -> in browser terms, it should have been possible to navigate with keyboard and screen-reader only, and it was (albeit it was quite clunky). So one variation of accesbility, is to support multiple languages. Its easy to look back with hindsight, but it was pretty apparent that UTF8 and Unicode was the direction for accessible language support. This was available from about 1993 -> the real issue here appers that software vendors chose a different path (eg: Java choosing to use double-byte characters), then became committed to it. And indeed we now see that braille support has been added to Unicode, abeit only recently -> imagine the accessibility support that would currently be available, if Win95 had have support unicode natively (font rendering and keycode composition) from day dot... "alt" tags have been available since html 1, with its recommended practise to show blank for img's that dont mean anything. "longdesc" has been available since html 4 (1998). Using the tab-key to navigate between elements, has been available in pretty much all browsers, for a long time - however it was cumbersome. However, from MSIE 4 (1997), tabindex became available (it took some time longer before Netscape had support for tabindex) -> this made it possible to produce decent navigation for web pages. Text language and direction was added in html 4 -> making Hebrew (et. al.) accessible. Finally, the "keypress" event handler has be around in various incarnations, not long afer Javascript was added to browsers. Its not unreasonable to require web developers to acutally use it (as opposed to just relying on "click" events). So basically, the about 1995 is about right, depending on the specific technology implementation. So now a slight rant... I dont understand how: <span role="aria-checkbox" ....> is better than: <input type="checkbox" ...> ? ARIA is good in that it documents technology, based on best practise -> in particular, I like how the accelerator keys are defined, but some things appears to be re-inventing stuff that doesn't need it. In fairness to the ARIA working group, I'm bound to have misunderstood the entire accessibility thing, so my opinion doesn't really matter. cheers, Mathew Robertson Note: I only speak English and I dont have a disability (except for maybe my mouth...) -> I'm just confident that developers shouldn't make any assumptions about how other people interface with technology. ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: memberh...@webstandardsgroup.org *******************************************************************
