On 9 Mar 2009, at 11:51, Robin Berjon wrote:
Heya all,
I'd like to de-escalate from some of the negative bits of this
discussion and try to focus on things that could lead to concrete
improvements for all.
On Mar 6, 2009, at 23:19 , Gregory J. Rosmaita wrote:
i'm not sure i understand why citing WCAG 2.0 is "unfair" or "hitting
below the belt" -- WCAG compliance SHOULD, nay MUST (and that is an
RFC2119 MUST)
It may not have been your intention, which is fine since we've all
made such mistakes, but your email came across as insinuating that
Doug and Cameron don't care about accessibility, which is what Doug
thought was unfair. It's an experimental tool, and they thought it
was marked up in a way that would make it accessible. It turns out
that it's not, and that's a bug, but filing a simple bug report
would have sufficed and probably been more effective than ascribing
intentions.
So, in order to make this constructive, do you have concrete ideas
on how to make a n by n table of multi-valued options accessible?
ARIA's a start, but I'm not sure it is powerful enough yet to do
that (I'd be happy to be proven wrong though). I can see two things
coming out of this: either there is a good way to make this
accessible, in which case it needs to be written up and published
(I'm guessing as one of those blog posts that W3C puts out that
outline specific uses for W3C technology); or there isn't in which
case the technology to do so needs to be specified (perhaps by
putting this example up as a use case for ARIA 2.0).
I've asked a couple of Opera’s accessibility experts that are on my
team if they can look into this. It isn't particularly easy apparently.
even if every one of my suggestions as regards w3c
publication rules and accessibility are concerned are implemented,
they
won't really help anyone unless there is an accompanying "About This
Document" section that describes in full what the stylistic
conventions
are -- for example, it is impossible for me to search for "red" text
because i don't have any reason to believe that the text is anything
particular color, but if i am pre-informed of the stylistic
conventions
This seems like a low-hanging fruit that could be picked. W3C
specifications only use so many conventions, and the pubrules
validator can enforce that a given section be present in all
documents. If there is a regular issue in making W3C specifications
accessible, then it needs to be solved and enforced across all
publications. The technology side is easy, we just need a set of
agreed-upon conventions (that doesn't need to be exhaustive in its
first iteration, I'm guessing that any improvement would be welcome
here).
if accessibility and device independence are NOT considered before a
tool or publication rules are deployed, then the WAI and the W3C have
failed in a crucial part of its mission -- to make the web usable by
everyone, everywhere, no matter what modality they are using to
interact
with the web...
There's a difference between not considering, and considering but
failing to deliver. I'd flip the issue around: if W3C staff and
chairs who are not educated about and onboard with making sure
everything is accessible but also technically very competent fail to
make at least some parts of their work accessible, how are we going
to get Joe Web Hacker to produce accessible content?
Accessibility testing is hard and resource-intensive. The W3C has
the chance that it has a strong and vibrant community around WAI,
and this synergy should be used. You've listed two accessibility
issues in this discussion (polling and specs), how can they be
improved, and where they are how can we communicate about them?
--
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/
Feel like hiring me? Go to http://robineko.com/
David Storey
Chief Web Opener / Product Manager, Opera Presto / Product Manager,
Opera Dragonfly
W3C WG: Mobile Web Best Practices / SVG Interest Group
Opera Software ASA, Oslo, Norway
Mobile: +47 94 22 02 32
