HTML Widgets a11y (was Re: GSOC 2008 advice)



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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