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Re: The a11y bugs project

for

From: Steve Faulkner
Date: Oct 26, 2011 1:39PM

hi Vlad,

"As with any campaign, there is a time for discussion, a cut-off time and a
time for everyone to come together to achieve a greater good. In the case of
this project, the greater good is to have these bugs fixed to match Firefox
implementation (which Steve questions) than not to have them fixed at all."

I suggest discussion should have been public from the start. Spending 10
mins surfing with images disabled in Firefox will provide enough evidence
for most people to conclude that Firefox's implementation is broken. Text
is sometimes cut off and other times overlaps other content.

Due to this, getting other browsers to match Firefox's implementation does
not achieve 'the greater good'.

Another issue is that Firefox's implementation provides no indication that
text is a replacement for an image, while this may be appropriate in some
circumstances it is not in others.

I would further suggest that working openly with the Firefox team to improve
their implementation would be a necessary precursor to working on cross
browser support.

regards
Steve

On 26 October 2011 19:23, Vlad Alexander < <EMAIL REMOVED> >wrote:

> As with any campaign, there is a time for discussion, a cut-off time and a
> time for everyone to come together to achieve a greater good. In the case of
> this project, the greater good is to have these bugs fixed to match Firefox
> implementation (which Steve questions) than not to have them fixed at all.
>
> Over the 5-month period, I have exchanged about a dozen emails with one
> browser vendor in particular. They used every possible tactic to push back
> fixing these bugs. Throughout this process, the only leverage we had was
> that another major browser vendor, Firefox, has a useful implementation.
> This made these items into "bugs" rather than "feature requests". This is a
> critical distinction! If Firefox has wrong implementation, then these items
> are new features to other vendors. If Firefox has correct implementation,
> then these items are bugs. Bugs can get fixed in a timely manner. New
> accessibility features are put at the end of the queue and right now, the
> queue is very long. And time is of the essence. Microsoft for example has a
> multi-year release cycle. If these bugs are not fixed in IE10, it will be
> years before they are fixed in IE11 or IE12.
>
> I hope that in light of the above, you can understand why I asked Steve to
> consider using back channels to get clarification on Firefox implementation
> of these bugs directly from a former Mozilla developer.
>
> I ask that we in the accessibility community work together for the greater
> good. Let's applaud Mozilla for having the best implementation for these 3
> accessibility bugs, compared to the other browsers. Let's get the other
> browser vendors on board!
>
> Regards,
> -Vlad
>
>
>