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

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Thu, 2008-02-28 at 12:40 -0500, Willie Walker 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.

Thanks for the info, Willie.  This is very good to hear.
Most of us are fairly ignorant of what's happening in the
accessibility world.

> 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.

Well, that's a disheartening potential blow against WebKit.
Yeah, I know, I know.  Why use WebKit when we already have
Gecko?  Well, in the roughly three and a half years since we
introduced Gecko to Yelp (which, by the way, caused a huge
accessibility stink at the time), it still has yet to produce
something that looks like a real API.  Using Gecko feels like
surgically extracting pieces of another application to make
some sort of monstrous Frankenapp.

History has shown that good APIs breed good applications.  If
you put something like WebKit, something with a sane API and
lots of functionality, into our stack, hitherto unforeseen
applications and features will begin to bubble up.  There is
a gaping whole in our developer platform that Gecko should
have filled years ago.  I don't know why it failed to, but
I do know that WebKit is showing more promise at this point.

--
Shaun