Yes, right now I think ARIA is ready for people to start playing with and get some good results form. It's an important technology and people shouldn't give up on it before trying it. There have not been any other proposals for accessibility in AJAX / Web 2.0 / Javascript widgets / RIAs / whatever you want to call it.
Even without community support, the parties involved are going to make it happen. But, a little community support in terms of trying it out and providing feedback would go a long way. First, it will help make ARIA improve faster, create a buzz, and help us get more industry adoption when the bigger players see the uptake. We really need to down the inaccessible Web 2.0 trend. Letting developers know that accessibility is still possible in the brave new world removes their excuses for ignoring accessibility completely.
- Aaron Sina Bahram wrote:
Hi Aaron, Thanks for this response ... as you can guess, some of my questions were more pointed than they needed to be so that I could voice some of the concerns that are privately conveyed to me off list, and I think you did a good job addressing most of them. Take care, Sina-----Original Message----- From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Aaron Leventhal Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2007 12:37 PM To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: accessible ajax Hi Sina, ARIA widgets work reasonably pretty well with JAWS in Firefox already, and it will continue to improve. That's because we just expose ARIA controls as MSAA. JAWS doesn't actually know whether the control is a regular HTML widget or an ARIA widget -- they see the same thing in MSAA. Yes, the majority of blind users use IE. I cannot speak about the business commitments of Microsoft and Freedom Scientific, but I can say a few things: - IBM is commited to making this work in Firefox + JAWS. - Mozilla is committed to making ARIA work in Firefox with open source ATs. Working is ongoing with the Orca team, for example, under a Mozilla Foundation grant - Microsoft is an active participant on the working group designing ARIA. While it's possible to make ARIA work in IE via the DOM, the preferred solution would be for Microsoft to do the mapping to accessibility APIs from within IE. They are aware that it's a problem that Web 2.0 is leaving people with disabilities behind. There's really a lot behind ARIA right now. If you look at the FAQ there's a section discussing where ARIA is being adopted (where we're allowed to mention it). Notice that I didn't say that ARIA is the end-all be all solution right now. I suggested becoming aware of it. People in the programming blind community should be aware of ARIA and understand its trajectory. And personally, if I'm a developer who cares about accessibility, and I'm working on an AJAX project, I at least want to know about ARIA. Why? It might affect my design. In addition, I might want to play with it and see where it's going, and even provide feedback. I might want to include the ARIA markup for those browsers that support ARIA. A couple things to note: - If you're already needing to use Javascript widgets or AJAX, you're mostly hosed without ARIA. At the very least, using ARIA won't make you less accessible - ARIA doesn't affect the way the page behaves or renders for mainstream users. So, by adding the markup while you build the widgets, instead of later, you'll continue to benefit from the improvements in ARIA supportalong the technology chain as they happen.- Aaron Sina Bahram wrote:Aaron, while you know I'm a huge supporter of ARIA, and love the work going on there. I find it very difficult to recommend it what-so-ever, or make any technical references to it, when I can't show it working withjaws, at all.Putting AT politics aside, the simple fact is that a majority of blind users use internet explorer, and a majority of them use jaws. This is a simple, and I would say easily demonstrable fact. So, ARIA has absolutely no purpose for these folks until we can realize it for jaws users ... you might convince them to start using Firefox, but you're going to run out of breath only after a very short time of trying to convince them to use WindowEyes or something else that's been hardcoded to work with this wonderful and revolutionary stuff.Please let me know if this is sounding obtuse, or if I'm missing a fundamental assumption, but ARIA is useless to a majority of blind users as it stands right now.Has FS made any commitments to it? Has Microsoft shown any willingness for IE discussions regarding it?What are the steps being taken to make this useful rather than turn it into something that could have been great?Take care, Sina -----Original Message----- From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx[mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Aaron LeventhalSent: Wednesday, October 24, 2007 10:31 AM To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: accessible ajaxYou should probably be aware of the work IBM, Mozilla, W3C, Opera and others are doing in the area of AJAX and DHTML accessibility.It's pretty exciting stuff -- making Web 2.0 accessibility possible. The major areas are keyboard accessibility, screen reader support of JavaScript widgets, making live changes on a page accessible, drag and drop, and support for landmarks in a page.Here's a FAQ about it -- don't be confused about the fact that it discusses HTML 5 (which doesn't exist yet). I wrote the FAQ to facilitate communication with the HTML 5 standards group:http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/ARIA:_Accessible_Rich_Internet_Ap plicat ions/Relationship_to_HTML_FAQThe easiest way to take advantage of it at this point would be to use Dojo, because of all the work that has been going on putting ARIA support into Dojo. You can also use ARIA directly. In addition, we'd love to get help from more developers to put ARIA support into other open source Javascript toolkits, such that users of Scriptaculous, JQuery, etc. would get accessibility for free.- Aaron jaffar wrote:Hi All. I have found an accessible, free and open source ajax development framework known as Open Lazlo. It consists of a web based development framework and a tomcat server which is directed to port 8080 on your pc. Although this is strictly an ajax framework, it is based on the LZX, xml based language which provides for very tight xml syntax. The website to download this app is, should you be interested, www.openlaszlo.org/ It is also worth noting that you will be able to create desktop apps with this framework. The only other dependency you will need to run Open Lazlo is the java development kit consisting of the JRE and the sdk which you can obtain from the java website. The framework itself is very easy to master, and the accompanying documentation is very good and comprehensive. Cheers!__________View the list's information and change your settings at //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind__________View the list's information and change your settings at //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind__________View the list's information and change your settings at //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind__________ View the list's information and change your settings at //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind __________View the list's information and change your settings at //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind
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