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Re: Accessibility training and scanning solutions providers

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From: JP Jamous
Date: Dec 17, 2016 3:47PM

Lisa,

My 2 cents is that this conversion between the HTML markup and the DOM translation can be impacted by so many factors. Let me give you an example.

I was coding once and wrote a CSS class to take 25% of a page and make the background a certain color because the background of the page was all white. There was no issue with the markup and even W3 validation give me the green light to go with it.

I loaded Firefox and the view was exactly as I wanted it. I loaded IE 9 and my wife was, "Umm, not the whole 25% is the color you specified." I thought my wife had too much to drink, because we had a large time difference and it was night time where she was. I kept trying and trying, but to no avail. Percentage was interpreted by IE differently from Firefox and Chrome.

So as you see, even the best markup can get screwed up by the browser agent. The same applies to the AT agent. Why does JAWS read the fieldset legend whenever a radio button is selected, but NVDA and VoiceOver do not do that. The mark up is the same. However, FS thought it would be best to keep repeating the legend whenever a new radio button obtained focus.

With the above in mind, how do you find the sweet sport? A checker would read the markup or the DOM and give you the green light. However, when you put it to the test it breaks with JAWS.

Personally, I get annoyed when the legend is read over and over. It is a waste of my precious time and the verbose output makes me forget what the radio buttons before the one I am on stated. I hope AT manufacturers provide a way to switch those on and off in the user settings.

All of those frustrations above are a result of how HTML started and the war between Microsoft and Netscape. I don't know if you recall that in the late 90's. I was starting in this field and witnessed the battle. That battle never stopped.

If you switch to desktop development, you would notice that the coding is more standardized than HTML. Eventually Windows is reading the binary file and loading it in memory.

Of course, the difference in interpreting the markup creates a competitive advantage for those manufacturers. That is why they won't change it. The Burdon fall on developers and WCAG evaluators. That is why we have to evaluate on a general level rather than a specific one. If we get specific, we start leaning towards level AAA and a big mess would be started.