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 with jaws, 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 Leventhal
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2007 10:31 AM
To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: accessible ajax
You 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_Applicat
ions/Relationship_to_HTML_FAQ
The 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
