Thread Subject: Re: Group A: 21(c) Keyboard focus

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From: Hoffman, Allen
Date: Mon, Oct 30 2006 9:40 AM

"I agree, and that's why I explicitly didn't say "built in"; I said
"support". The goal is to make sure that a company selling a new tool
gives some thought to how its outputs would be evaluated for
accessibility."

Continuing this thread:

I'll stay away from issues surrounding if, or if not, competition has to
be ensured for particular IT items, or at what level it should be
ensured--can of worms. However, when I mention development tools, I
would separate tools into "EIT development" tools, and "content"
development tools. I have not worked through this language development
process to the end yet, but here is a stab:

EIT which primary function is to produce software or web applications,
shall include a method to systematically review those products
source-code and/or interfaces to identify interface elements which lack
required accessibility information including focus, identity, state, and
operation. Note, probably needs longer list to include
text-descriptions of non-text elements, blinking items, tabular
displays, etc.

EIT which primary function is to produce information to be delivered by
other EIT items, must include the ability to systematically review
produced content and identify, and allow remediation of accessibility
attributes including alternate text, tabular data and header
association, logical reading-order, (and I'm sure more).

Given this kind of definition, something like Adobe Dream Weaver would
fall into the first group, while Microsoft Word would fall into the
second generally. it could be argued that "primary" might be a poor
choice of language as Microsoft Word can produce electronic forms, which
should, in my view, be classified as EIT.

However, this is why we have such as great group of folks on the
subcommittee to help us work it out.

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