Thread Subject: Re: General Issues: AT responsibility

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From: Sean Hayes
Date: Wed, Jan 10 2007 8:15 AM

I believe row and header elements are a specific example of the more general case of labelling elements. If there is some reason why they should be handled differently can someone explain why they need to be special cased.

Sean Hayes
Standards and Policy Team
Accessible Technology Group
Microsoft
Phone:
mob +44 7977 455002
office +44 117 9719730

-----Original Message-----
From: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = [mailto: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = ] On Behalf Of Andi Snow-Weaver
Sent: 09 January 2007 21:57
To: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
Subject: [teitac-websoftware] General Issues: AT responsibility


In the course of our discussions on the exisiting 508 provisions, some
other, more general issues popped up.

One of these is the issue of AT responsibility to support what IT provides.
Mike Fratkin brought up the issue during the discussion on row and column
headers. [1] It is often the case that the IT software or website is
providing accessibility information correctly through a standard
accessibility API, however, the AT is not extracting the information and
providing it to the user.

Someone else mentioned that screen row and column header information would
be useful to screen magnifier users but that, even though the information
is available to the AT, screen magnifiers don't provide the information to
users.

508 currently does not enforce any requirements on AT to support what IT
provides. Thoughts on this topic?

[1] http://teitac.org/mailarchives/mail_message.php?id=1439&listid=3

Andi

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