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Re: Proper Markup on Web Pages

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From: Sean Murphy
Date: May 16, 2016 3:18AM

Web design is like building a house. If the foundation is flawed, then the building will eventually fail. The libraries, frameworks and any other tool used to develop and display the rich content available on the net now should be accessible. As we all know.

If more and more development tools become in-accessible, Then you are already losing the race. Regardless what standards are present. People have to be willing to adopt and apply the standards to their projects. This has been the biggest challenge and as much as their have been great innovations occurring on the net. Equally there have been a lot of in-accessible innovations blocking the whole community.

How do you change this attitude of some developers so they include it in their core functionality of their tools which other's use?

1. University courses must include accessibility compliance, design, etc as part of the software degrees.
2. Owners of sites should include accessibility as a part of their RFP's. Then it is the responsibility of the development team to use the right tool.
3. Certification if they exist for web development should include accessibility.
4. A registry listing accessible tools and libraries.
5. For open source and this might work for commercial vendors as well. A competition that has a nice little price tag for projects that include accessibility.
6. The least one that people might like, but I think it is necessary. Law.
7. A Social Investment Fund that is design for those people are passionate about disability and accessibility to invest into those organisations that build accessible tools and libraries plus more.
8. Mention already here, someone includes the accessibility into the tool. The problem with this one you need someone with the know how and this is a very small group of people compared to the average developer.

Just my 2 cents worth.

Sean









> On 14 May 2016, at 12:58 PM, Brandon Keith Biggs < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
> Hello,
> I think a web browser counts as a normal native app. What regulations are
> there for native apps?
> But there are really only 4 or 5 different web browsers out there and the
> only ones that are not accessible are Edge and Chrome. Chrome is working
> pretty hard to make itself accessible though.
> What could Firefox do to make itself more accessible?
> Thanks,
>
>
> Brandon Keith Biggs <http://brandonkeithbiggs.com/>;
>
> On Fri, May 13, 2016 at 7:02 PM, Brooks Newton < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
> wrote:
>
>> Hi Jonathan,
>>
>> Thanks for your thoughts on why software regulation, in terms of why its
>> absent from the most recent ADA SANPRM. Your suggestions are helpful to me
>> and likely to others trying to sort out this mess.
>>
>> I'm very happy that you agree, as I think most experts in this field
>> would, that "frameworks, user agents, authoring tools, and software is very
>> important" to figuring out the digital accessibility puzzle.
>>
>> When thinking about how to best plan for the accessibility of Web sites,
>> I believe it is important to understand the roles that operating systems,
>> user agents / browsers and assistive technology play in the overall Web
>> user experience. I'm certainly not even close to being as much as an expert
>> in this area as others on this list are. So, let me just ask this
>> question: Have you, or anyone else on this thread ever heard of person who
>> absorbs page content directly from the source code without parsing it
>> through a user agent / browser? I sure haven't.
>>
>> Is it even possible to have a "user experience" without the help of a
>> browser to parse Web page source code? It seems like an artificial exercise
>> in futility to separate out Web content, as those who drafted the ADA Title
>> II SANPRM have done, as the lone piece of the digital accessibility puzzle
>> that must be regulated. After all, Web content alone does not make a user
>> experience.
>>
>> For users with certain types of disabilities, utilization of assistive
>> technology is just as necessary in building an accessible user experience
>> as is the use of Web browsers. In order for each and every one of us to
>> Perceive, to Operate, and to Understand Web content, we must first pass the
>> content through an operating system, a browser, and in many cases,
>> assistive technology to make sense of the raw source code over which
>> content owners have control (let's not even discuss third party content at
>> this point). Additionally, what does it mean for Web page code to be
>> "Robust," when none of the necessary software is required to be standards
>> compliant? How is my specification-compliant page code robust (in other
>> words, largely "future proof"), when in no way, shape, or form are browser
>> manufacturers obligated to process my code in a consistent manner that pays
>> heed to the same standard content owners are obligated to follow? Should
>> we just count on software manufacturers to "do the right thing," when that
>> same approach has yielding exceedingly disappointing results when it comes
>> to measuring compliance by site content owners? Have we the experts, and
>> the regulators who follow our advice, provided content owners with a clear
>> path forward to make their Web pages and mobile apps accessible? What is
>> keeping a software manufacturer from changing their browser functionality,
>> for example, so that what works in my page code today, doesn't work for my
>> page code tomorrow?
>>
>> Again, I'd like to put forth the notion that there is no such thing as a
>> "Web user experience" without intermediating software. If there is some
>> sort of technical reason why the U.S. Department of Justice has
>> specifically decided to regulate Web content, and not the software that
>> facilitates the content to be Perceivable, Operable, Understandable and
>> Robust (the core tenets of WCAG 2.0), I'd sure like to know that. If that
>> is the case, I'd also like to know what the appropriate agency is that has
>> jurisdiction over Web software, so that we could make sure that appropriate
>> regulation is evolving at the same time as the ADA updates so that all of
>> the appropriate parties are doing their requisite parts to make
>> accessibility the norm, not the exception.
>>
>> Is this really just a monumental oversight? Have we really gone this far
>> down the regulatory road without holding fully accountable all of the
>> integral parts of the accessibility puzzle?
>>
>> Brooks Newton
>>
>>