[whatwg] Dynamic content accessibility in HTML today

Aaron Leventhal aaronlev at moonset.net
Mon Aug 14 17:13:39 PDT 2006


I'll think about it what you say about the checkbox. Honestly it hasn't 
come up before. You're right in that if images are turned off then this 
example is no  longer accessible to sighted users.

While screen readers aren't the only important thing, they are 
important. If we put an alt text there then I find it likely that the 
screen reader will speak redundant, confusing information, at least in 
Firefox 1.5  I'll have to think about how we can avoid that.

Thanks for bringing up the point.

- Aaron



Jim Ley wrote:
> On 14/08/06, Aaron Leventhal <aaronlev at moonset.net> wrote:
>> I hadn't considered putting an alt text on it, because the image's
>> function is described by the role itself.
>
> It's got nothing to do with it's function, you've got an image in the
> page, to be accessible a user has to be able to find out what the
> image is - unless it's purely decorative where you could have an empty
> one - but this is a functional image - so it must have an ALT, there
> is no discussion
>
>> Does the image for a checkbox using a standard html need an alt text?
>
> The standard HTML checkbox is not an image, it's a checkbox...
>> So, I'm not sure why you stopped looking after
>> that
>
> Because you claimed something was truly accessible, when you'd not
> made the first step of ensuring images have ALT text, say, here's an
> example which makes  an image used as a checkbox accessible to some
> screen readers, and if you put in a lot of other work you could make
> it accessible to other people would've been okay, but you didn't you
> chose to claim it was truly accessible.
>
>> It seems like something else is bothering you about my message.
>
> Just the all too common claim of accessibility authors not actually
> increasing accessibility just moving it to a different group having
> problems.
>
>> In any
>> case, I'm only here as a fellow colleague providing food for thought. I
>> hope that's not a problem.
>
> Oh definately not, your work is very useful!  Just don't make the
> mistake of over-claiming what you do, the examples are not accessible,
> they aren't unfortunately.
>
>> The core is, accessibility is important and
>> no doubt there are places where whatwg does things better,
>
> I don't think the what-wg does a good job of accessibility at all,
> there are some good ideas certainly, but there's also a lot of badness
> due to the degrading to a whole heap of script that's required in a
> number of areas.
>
> Your work on Role is very good, and I'd certainly encourage you to
> stay participating in the what-wg.
>
> Jim.
>



More information about the whatwg mailing list