[webkit-dev] W3C Proposal: User Interface Independence for Accessible Rich Internet Applications

[Mike Marchywka]

________________________________
> From: cfleizach at apple.com
> Date: Thu, 2 Sep 2010 17:34:07 -0700
> To: webkit-dev at lists.webkit.org
> CC: jcraig at apple.com
> Subject: [webkit-dev] W3C Proposal: User Interface Independence for
> Accessible Rich Internet Applications
>
> Hello WebKit,
>
> James and I have been working on a W3C proposal to address some
> shortcomings we've noticed in terms of dealing with ScreenReaders and
> magnifiers in the wild wild web.
>
> It's aim is to add JavaScript capabilities to window.navigator and new
> AccessibilityEvents so that web developers are able to make web pages
> that interact with assistive technology to a degree they cannot today.

Sorry if this is explained in the links but maybe it is worth discussing
what, in this context, is accessibility related and what is simply
integrated into a larger set of "stuff" to deal with limitations
of platform IO (small display and kbd ) or user impairment ( this
can include driving while reading web pages for example as
the driving task impairs ability to safely read text ). 
Certainly an ability to zoom text is well known, but a text to
speech facility or re-rendering from web author's original
intent ( text to audio conversion) could be of general interest.

[ I guess this also motivates another general rant I have on
structured "data documents" versus display formats like PDF which
may be larger while being less adaptable due to loss of information
( removing text to send bitmapped characters for example, former could 
reasonably by converted to audio with a "reader" technology but not the latter).]



>
> If you're interested in accessibility, please take a look and send any
> feedback to us, or to these w3c lists (wai-xtech, www-dom,
> public-canvas-api, and public-html-comments) it was posted to
>
>
> User Interface Independence for Accessible Rich Internet Applications
>
> W3C Proposal: 30 August 2010
>
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/wai-xtech/2010Aug/att-0079/UserInterfaceIndependence.html
>
>
> PS:
> I had originally submitted a patch for half of this proposal, but we
> decided it would be best to make this public before landing it in
> webkit.
> https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=43005
>