Re: WebKit and GNOME

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi All:

Just my 2 cents here:

I would definitely object to WebKit being the de facto rendering engine 
if it did not support accessibility.  In addition, as WebKit 
accessibility work is done, I recommend looking at the existing AT-SPI 
implementation done in Gecko as a potential model for how the document 
model can be represented via AT-SPI -- it was developed with real world 
experience.  Furthermore, I would also recommend collaborating with 
assistive technologies along the way, making sure design decisions are 
actually workable solutions.  Finally, if it has not already been done, 
I would suggest that the keyboard navigation model be nailed down -- 
mouseless users need to be able to fully navigate web pages, cut/paste 
content, etc.

For ARIA, I agree that basic accessibility integration for web content 
is a higher priority.  This does not mean, however, that ARIA support 
should not be included in the plans.  My hope is that Maciej really 
meant "we will look at basic accessibility integration first and ARIA 
next" instead of "ARIA is an interesting toy and we won't support it."  
;-)

For yelp, I'm comforted that the team is targeting an accessible 
solution for GNOME 2.24: 
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=499744.  This will help give 
our users much needed access to help and not require them to wait for 
WebKit a11y to emerge.

Will

On Apr 1, 2008, at 6:32 PM, Eitan Isaacson wrote:

> On Tue, 2008-04-01 at 16:37 -0400, David Bolter wrote:
> > Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> > > 4) Accessibility. This is only implemented in the Mac port currently.
> > > We are moving the core accessibility code to be cross-platform, which
> > > should make it fairly straightforward to hook it up to ATK or other
> > > accessibility APIs. Sometimes ARIA is mentioned in the context of
> > > accessibility - this is an interesting technology for future web 
> > > apps,
> > > but I believe basic accessibility integration for web content is a
> > > higher priority.
> >
> > This wording "Sometimes ARIA is mentioned in the context of
> > accessibility - this is an interesting technology for future web apps"
> > doesn't seem quite right to me. ARIA enabled browsers such as Firefox
> > provide access to ARIA enabled DHTML applications today. Opera and IE8
> > are adding support today. Google is putting ARIA into its web 
> > applications.
>
> I agree with David. ARIA is becoming a major component in any 
> accessible
> web application. It's not something in the distant future. It would be
> premature to crown webkit as the GNOME engine for all purposes until
> this is properly addressed. Nonetheless, for basic document viewing,
> like Yelp, Webkit could be a good solution, providing it has accessible
> structured document support.
>
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