HTML Widgets a11y (was Re: GSOC 2008 advice)

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

I'm retitling this because I was just deleting GSOC mail -- my inbox is 
flooding and I needed to do some drastic filtering.  Many thanks to 
Behdad for seeing this message and thinking of me.  :-)

For HTML accessibility, the best support is provided by the Gecko engine 
that's in Firefox 3.  We've worked very closely with Mozilla on this 
work, and we have pretty decent support for emerging web technologies 
like AJAX/ARIA/LiveRegions as a result.  It was a VERY significant effort.

If anyone is doing any sophisticated presentation of web content, I'd 
really recommend they use the Gecko engine that FF3 uses, and I'm happy 
to hear this is on the Yelp radar screen.  I just cannot imagine the 
effort it will take to add full a11y support to some other HTML widget.

Will

Shaun McCance wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-02-28 at 08:18 -0500, Luis Villa wrote:
> > One followup, one other suggestion, one followup.
> > On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 2:49 PM, Luis Villa<luis tieguy org>  wrote:
> > >   * "widgets": Vista, OSX, and KDE4 all have widgets/gadgets/Kthingies
> > >   that are pretty, very easy to use, very easy to develop (since they
> > >   are web-based), and which display more information when needed while
> > >   staying hidden when not needed (both unlike our panel applets.) Some
> > >   work has already been done on doing this with gtk-webkit[1]- perhaps
> > >   that could be built on? (It seems to me that from a user perspective
> > >   this approach is really superior to applets and what we should be
> > >   focusing on long-term instead of reworking applets, but YMMV.)
> > Both screenlets and gdesklets have been pointed out to me offlist. I
> > was aware of both of them, but I didn't mention them here because I
> > don't think writing our own custom widgets is the way to go- we should
> > (at least to start) join the html-based widget bandwagon everyone else
> > is already on so that we can benefit from that base of applications.
> > Perhaps adding HTML widget support to one of them is the right thing,
> > though.
>
> Given that the Foundation has just earmarked US$50,000 for
> accessibility-related bounties, I'm curious how HTML widgets
> fare with accessibility.  I often hear that dynamic web 2.0
> applications are suboptimal in terms of accessiblity, and
> this would naturally translate to suboptimal accessibility
> in HTML widgets.
>
> I'd be very interested to see an analysis from one of our
> accessibility experts on this subject.
>
> --
> Shaun
>
>
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