Re: GSOC 2008 advice

[David Bolter <dtb gnome org>]

Hi Shaun,

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.
>
>   

There are many working hard on this. and it has required coordination 
between browsers (e.g. FF), web2.0 toolkits (e.g. dojo), and AT (e.g. 
Orca). It is happening :)

Here are some resources to get you started:
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Accessible_DHTML
http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-roadmap/
http://dojotoolkit.org/projects/dijit

Ping me anytime to chat about it (davidb on IRC).

cheers,
David