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Re: open vs. closed products or accessibility supportedornot

for

From: Tim Harshbarger
Date: Feb 23, 2011 3:18PM

The way I am reading it, if the AT doesn't pick that information up and
convey it to the user and you deem that AT necessary for a technology to
be considered accessibility supported, then that technology is not
accessibility supported. The way I am understanding accessibility
supported, it means that all the pieces need to be in place and working.

If the situation is that the AT use to work, but now has a bug that
prevents it from working, then you probably need to decide if the issue
is just temporary, long term, or permanent.

My thought is that the benefit of an inspection tool is that it lets you
know where the problem is so that you can fix it and deem the technology
accessibility supported. or that the technology is being used in a
accessibility supported manner.

At least, that is my take on it.

Thanks!
Tim


-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Hoffman,
Allen
Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2011 1:24 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] open vs. closed products or accessibility
supportedornot

So what if the AT has a bug and isn't picking up the information right?
Tests fail for this reason based on an AT vendor issue. Platforms where
accessibility services are provided should provide inspection tools so
this can be independently validated by developers, and acceptance and
quality assurance testers.


-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Harshbarger [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ]
Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2011 4:25 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] open vs. closed products or accessibility
supported ornot

Looking at the WCAG 2.0 information about "accessibility supported", I
don't think the existence of inspection tools are necessary to consider
the technology accessibility supported.

It seems to me that as long as the technology allows an application to
pass information through an accessibility framework to user
agents/assistive technology and that information is then passed along to
the user, then the technology could be considered accessibility
supported.

If my understanding is correct, then I would think the only thing that
is necessary to determine if a technology is accessibility supported
would be to set up a series of test cases using the technology to see if
accessibility information is conveyed to the user. An inspection tool
would be useful in determining where any failures occur, but the test
case would just have to fail for the technology to be considered not
accessibility supported.

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Hoffman,
Allen
Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2011 12:02 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: [WebAIM] open vs. closed products or accessibility supported or
not

Question:
When is a system considered accessibility supported, or "open/closed"?.

If a system has available assistive technology, available accessibility
services for applications to utilize, but no inspection tools are
available to determine if indeed object information is being used, and
if so, is it accurate, is the platform considered accessibility
supported or open/closed?

So, for Apple platform what inspection tools are there?
So for Android, what inspection tools are there?
So, for Blackberry what inspection tools are there?
So, for WebOS what inspection tools are there, or for that matter what
accessibility services are there?

I know Linux and windows inspection tools exist.



Allen Hoffman