Re: [g-a-devel] Extensible states (or properties)

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

Peter Korn wrote:

> Hi Aaron,
>
> Aaron Leventhal wrote:
>
> > For the email example, flagged is indicated with a color.
> > For the IM example, away is indicated with a color. The status string 
> > is not rendered unless you hover over the buddy name.
> >
> > How would you recommend exposing these today?
>
>
> The color is an attribute of the text, so text attributes make sense 
> certainly for the color itself.  The color is an indication of 
> meaning.  As Bill suggests, you could add another text attribute with 
> the string meaning for the colored range of text (in this case all of 
> the text).  But I don't think that is very discoverable.  I think that 
> as this is really an attribute of the object that the text is 
> representing, AccessibleDescription is a fine choice for conveying 
> this info.

Hi Peter:

I have to disagree with you about AccessibleDescription here; it's at 
odds with the way we are using AccessibleDescription elsewhere on the 
desktop.  We aren't using accessible-description as a catch-all for 
annotations, but rather for a more verbose or descriptive rendition of 
the object's "identiy".  Thus accessible-description for an email "cell" 
(remember that we're looking at a table here...) might be the _whole_ 
message subject line, etc. whereas the onscreen rendition via the Text 
interface may be truncated.  I submit that in the case we are not 
considering, this would be a better use of the 'description' attribute.

Text attributes ARE IMO discoverable - ATs should be looking for 
explicit text attributes and exposing them to end-users either on demand 
or according to some heuristic, since sighted users will see them in one 
form or another.  For instance, a screenreader should not ignore the 
fact that text may be marked <em> or <b>; the latter 'might' be just eye 
candy, but the former at least suggests that the text has been 
semantically marked and thus the screenreader should always be looking 
at/for text attributes.

Bill

> Peter Korn
> Accessibility Architect,
> Sun Microsystems, Inc.
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-devel