[whatwg] Dynamic content accessibility in HTML today

[James Graham]

Matthew Raymond wrote:

>>> [...] where a proper CSS presentation for the users primary media is
>>> not available [...]
>> This is almost always the case on the real web.
> 
>    Yeah, the web masters are so lazy that they can't be bothered to add
> accessibility via CSS, but they'll be working overtime putting in |role|
> attributes using the correct predefined values.
> 
> /me rolls eyes.

Roll your eyes all you want but when you get bored, perhaps you'd like 
to try thinking about the relative difficulty of the two tasks instead 
:-) For many widgets it is entirely obvious what their role attribute 
should be (if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it's a duck). 
So adding this information to the semantic layer (i.e. not CSS) is easy. 
Furthermore, people who make common widget toolkits can add 
accessibility information at the toolkit layer (see e.g. [1]) so authors 
don't need to work very hard.

>>>    I don't see a significant difference between |role| and predefined
>>> values for |class|.
>> Oh and I'm allergic to predefined class values :)
> 
>    I would suggest a strong antihistamine whenever you use a microformat.

Indeed there are, I believe, a number of problems with microformats 
associated with their use of the class attribute (e.g. I remember a 
discussion some time ago in which it turned out that microformats must 
use globally unique classnames)