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

[David Bolter <dtb gnome org>]

Hi Shaun,

A quick note about WebKit and ARIA inline below:

Shaun McCance wrote:
> 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.
>   
A few days ago I added some Google SOC task ideas on this :)
http://trac.webkit.org/projects/webkit/wiki/Google%20Summer%20of%20Code%202008

Note I link from this page to the stagnating ARIA bug ticket on WebKit: 
http://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12132

Feel free to chime in :)

cheers,
David

> 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
>
>
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