Re: HTML Widgets a11y (was Re: GSOC 2008 advice)

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi Adel:

Adding ARIA to AJAX widgets would be the right thing to do as a content 
provider.  As a user, the right thing is then to use a browser that 
supports ARIA and accessibility well (i.e., Firefox 3).

You can read about some of the great work done by Scott Haeger from the 
Orca team here:

  http://live.gnome.org/Orca/Firefox/ARIAWidgets
  http://live.gnome.org/Orca/Firefox/LiveRegions

The "Other Resources" section at the bottom of the ARIAWidgets page has 
tons of information on ARIA.  Plus, David Bolter, who's a member of the 
GNOME Accessibilty community has tons of experience working on ARIA in 
Dojo.

Hope this helps!

Will

adel wrote:
> yesterday on #a11y
>
> 10:31<  adel>  hey, I need a little help, I am building javascript
> widgets, am doing my best making the widgets accessible, currently I
> use W3C's ARIA documents, dojo are doing the same but unlike dojo, I
> only care (the accessible thing) about GNOME and its technology, is
> ARIA the best approach to make dynamic web site accessible to GNOME
> users? and how do I test those ARIA roles on GNOME?
>
>
> On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 5:40 PM, Willie Walker<William Walker sun com>  wrote:
> > 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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