Government guidelines, ARIA, microformats
Not so much a blog post but a collection of links.
UK government browser guidelines: good sense prevails
The Web Standards community changed some guidelines for government webmasters that would encourage designing to browsers into something that requires valid code, web standards and progressive enhancement. UK government browser guidelines: good sense prevails.
Talking of guidelines, I’m doing a short talk on Wednesday about BS 8878: Web accessibility – Building accessible experiences for disabled people at the Oxford Geek Night. See you there?
How Can I Validate (X)HTML + ARIA?
A while ago I speculated that the lack of a validator for ARIA might slow adoption. Steve Faulkner has written a proof-of-concept HTML4+ARIA Checker and hopes, as I do, that “the W3C validator adds support for (X)HTML +ARIA documents so I when check a document and it contains no errors in the HTML (except for the use of ARIA) and ARIA code, I see a message like this: this document was successfully checked. Passed (1 Warning)”
Should you think that ARIA is just w3c vapourware, there’s a podcast on ARIA by Freedom Scientific (the manufacturers of the JAWS screenreader) available:
Freedom Scientific’s Chief Technical Officer Glen Gordon explains ARIA and its benefits. Jonathan Mosen then demonstrates some applications with ARIA enabled for improved accessibility.
Didn’t see a transcript anywhere, surprise surprise.
More bandaids for microformats
Pat “Herb” Lauke wonders “if we should have an official anniversary each year where the same microformat/accessibility issue is rehashed” and links to an experiment by Andy Clarke. It’s a nice idea, but I think it’s a bandaid. I agree with Isofarro’s diagnosis:
It boils down to this: the title attribute is meant for human consumable content, just the same as the inner text of most of the HTML elements.
Everytime you put machine-formatted data into a container that is for human consumption, then you run the risk of it being exposed to a human being. In microformats this a ‘feature’, in accessibility this a ‘bug’.
I think that’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater to say “the easiest approach right now is to say Microformats are inaccessible, and move along”; it’s just this pattern that’s inaccessible.
Patrick suggests, “why not make a ‘title attribute’ pattern that allows for the use of the most semantically appropriate element? span with title in cases like datetime, abbr when it is actually an abbreviation.”
That makes sense to me. How would those plugins that make use of microformats cope if I marked up hCalendar dates with a span. Anyone know?
6 Responses to “ Government guidelines, ARIA, microformats ”
Correction to my last comment: I first raised it in April 2006
I stirred this nest up in June, and at the time things like Operator and Brian Suda’s XSL transform didn’t work with spans.
Sorry for my lack of clarity. Swignition is the only parser to announce support for that pattern.
sorry, isn’t having data in the title attribute the problem?
You called? I proposed a data-in-title pattern such as that described by Patrick a year ago, but as usual the microformats cabal has done nothing to address this significant accessibility problem, which I first raised in September 2006.
The excellent parser Swignition (formerly ‘Cognition’) has already implemented it, though.