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Re: Accessibility and outdated AT

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Dec 9, 2010 8:30PM

On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 1:48 PM, Tony Trott wrote:

> Essentially, I guess I'm asking if web accessibility is required to be
> backwards-

This is a difficult question and one without a straightforward answer.
Certainly you would want to support older technologies to a point that
is reasonable. But you must draw the line somewhere. There are many
things (Flash, PDF, much scripted content, ARIA-based interfaces,
etc.) that just cannot be made accessible to antiquated technologies.
Few people bother any more to ensure full compatibility with IE5 or
Netscape 4 - and JAWS 6 (a full 6 versions behind the current version
12) would, in my opinion, be in the same category as these browsers.

Our survey (http://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey2/) showed
that 83% of respondents updated their screen reader within the
previous year, but we know that there are many users with very old
screen readers. Fortunately, screen reader support is not a binary
state with most web content (excluding Flash, PDF, etc.) - it's not
like someone with JAWS 6 wouldn't get anything on your web page.
Instead, they simply would not get many of the enhanced accessibility
features and support that users of newer screen readers would. This,
for the most part, is their problem, not yours.

Jared Smith
WebAIM