WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Accessible Mega Menu and Safari

for

From: Bryan Garaventa
Date: Apr 4, 2016 2:52PM


I understand the frustration, having been dealing with the same situation for many years.

The value however for focusing on a single spec compliant approach for authoring, is that the specification is meant to be equally followed across all browsers as a common goal. So when spec compliant code is implemented, it doesn't have to be constantly updated by developers all the time to achieve a specific result.

As you mentioned, this is a moving target, and some browsers do this better than others, but as time goes on and more and more browsers refer to the same spec for this functionality, then your code implementation will automatically become more accessible in the future in these other browsers as well, without requiring constant updating to achieve on your end.

If we do it the other way though, where developers are responsible for reinventing the wheel every time to get a specific behavior or result in one AT/browser combination, then have to do this differently for every variation, nothing will ever work right in the future, because it will be impossible to achieve interoperability without requiring a complete rewrite of all such frameworks to do it again from scratch.