[access-uk] Re: Firefox, Internet Explorer, and MSAA [was: Re: Re: Dominos Pizza website]

Benjamin,

        I suspect you may be confusing a standard, with a defacto standard.
The two are not the same.

        As the Wikipedia page you referenced suggests, a standard may not
enjoy the support of many people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard

        A defacto standard on the other hand, is one followed by popular
inclination, not by authorised guideline or law.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_facto

        If your estimate of 85% is correct, then Internet Explorer is a
clear case of a defacto standard, not a standard.

Regards,
Léonie.



        Given your  

-----Original Message-----
From: access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
Sent: 18 August 2007 18:50
To: access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [access-uk] Re: Firefox, Internet Explorer, and MSAA [was: Re: Re:
Dominos Pizza website]

Alasdair King wrote:

> Firefox's standards-compliance is irrelevant: 

Until we know exactly what Steve was having trouble with, I don't understand
how we can dismiss any difference between Firefox and Internet Explorer as
irrelevant to his problems.

As Ray notes in his reply, many sites only work in other browsers so long as
they ignore the standards that developers should code to and instead copy
Internet Explorer's proprietary extensions and bugs. That's not always
desirable, and in any case difficult because Internet Explorer is an
exceptionally complicated black box:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_box

Many web developers are used to spending half their time building their site
to work roughly according to spec in every other popular browser, and then
half their time working out why Explorer is breaking it and layering hack
upon hack until it sort of works.

> His screenreader will have been built to handle Internet Explorer's 
> presentation of web pages, and Firefox support has been added at a 
> later date and isn't so advanced. it's the ability of Steve's screenreader
to use it that is the issue.

If the screen reader does not support Firefox effectively, Steve's problem
may represent a bug in the screen reader not in Firefox's use of MSAA. But
Steve wasn't complaining about the limitations of his screen reader; he was
making a specific claim that Firefox made poor use of MSAA and even more
specifically that it wasn't exposing some links or link text correctly to
MSAA. That can't be verified with any screen reader; you need to use an MSAA
inspector tool. I wasn't willing to assume outright that Steve had not
verified that Firefox was the problem, not his screen reader, and (if so)
that Firefox's use of MSAA was the problem, not its HTML parsing or
JavaScript evaluation. So I asked how he knew.

> Firefox support will improve in time if users demand it and its MSAA 
> implementation doesn't change. Ideally, in terms of support, its MSAA 
> implementation would be identical to Internet Explorer's, since this 
> is the de facto standard and the reference implementation of a web 
> browser for screenreader developers.

I think it's confusing to describe Internet Explorer as a "de facto
standard" when the reality is it's just a very popular browser (with roughly
85% of users):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

This is especially true given the typical usage of "web standards" to refer
to written specifications.

I realise you were probably using the term loosely but I don't think it's
correct to call Explorer a "reference implementation" either. 
Software that fails to implement the relevant specifications, has no public
test suite, and is closed source seems radically inconsistent with what
Wikipedia (for example) has to say about reference
implementations:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_implementation

Likewise it seems inconsistent with genuine Microsoft reference
implementations, such as the Project REAL Reference Implementation that
includes documentation, test data, and sample code:

http://urlx.org/microsoft.com/c9e4d

While it's important to try to ensure that most web content accessible in
Explorer is also accessible in Firefox, I fundamentally disagree that
Explorer's use of MSAA should be copied slavishly. IMHO Mozilla should be
trying to make the most accessible application they can with whatever tools
are available, rather than mimicking the lowest common denominator and
repeating Microsoft's mistakes.

Firefox needs to provide consistent web access across platforms, and
Explorer's use of MSAA is not especially relevant to assistive technology
that uses more advanced frameworks, like VoiceOver and Orca, or interacts
with Firefox's DOM directly, like Fire Vox. Nor is Explorer's use of MSAA
relevant to the various web features that Firefox supports but IE does not.

In practice, on the Windows platform, Mozilla have aimed to copy Explorer's
use of MSAA, but with necessary additions to provide better standards
support and accessibility to modern web technology that Explorer does not
support (such as ARIA and MathML). In conjunction with other application
developers (such as Sun and IBM) and assistive technology developers (such
as GW-Micro and Freedom Scientific), Mozilla have been working to
standardize their extensions to MSAA so that other developers can hack
better accessibility onto MSAA in the same way:

http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/Accessibility/IAccessible2

Some developers (NVDA's developers among them) seem to be already
prioritizing Firefox over Internet Explorer, precisely because accessibility
with Firefox is easier to achieve and provides greater benefits to end
users.

> I use Firefox myself, but I'm sighted. Much better browser for me.

I don't want to see Mozilla blamed when it's not their fault, but I wasn't
trying to start a discussion about which browser is "better" in general
terms. SuI want to make sure that if there are bugs in browsers, screen
readers, or important websites, they get fixed. Waiting around for browser
developers or assistive technology vendors or web developers to happen to
fix the bugs accidentally isn't as effective as identifying the bugs and
reporting them to the people who can fix them. That's why it's important to
press for details when problems are mentioned. It may even be that the
problems turn out to be user error and not bugs at all.

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
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