Thread Subject: Re: Startingdiscussionson theAccessibilityAPIproposal

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From: Barrett, Don
Date: Thu, Jan 11 2007 8:45 AM

As I have stated before, it's hard to mandate the synergy between the IT
and the AT. The best you can hope for is to mandate as specifically as
possible what the IT must do, and then have the AT catch up to the same
spec.

One of the reasons the web standards have been so successful is that you
can literally look at code and say, "Yes, you have met the standard," or
"no, you haven't." You can check table headers, frame names, alt
attributes, etc. This gives the standards weight and teeth and
credibility.

For software, it's much harder, because everything is under the hood,
and the difficulties in achieving provability and testability lead to
less accountability overall.

Can the standards require that tools, if they exist, such as the Ferret
and the Monkey and Inspect Objects, etc. be utilized to show adherence
to a given set of specifications? I would love to see it if possible.
Greg is right that it is in the testing that the rubber really meets the
road, and anything we can do to build some level of testability or
accountability into the standards will move us further in that
direction.

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