Accessibility
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Accessibility Tools Task Force
This is the Wiki for the Open AJAX Alliance Accessibility Tools Task Force. The growing adoption of Rich Internet Applications (RIA) has resulted in the development of new accessibility standards and specifications such as the W3C WAI Accessible Rich Internet Application Specification (WAI-ARIA) and the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG2). Although accessibility tool providers and venders are moving to support WCAG 2, compliance is not fully addressed or understood in a RIA environment. For example, in WCAG2, Guideline 4.1 Compatible: Maximize compatibility with current and future user agents, including assistive technologies, there is a subtle dependence upon the WAI-ARIA specification in success criterion 4.1.2. This requirement dicttates that, for all user interface components, the name and role of these components can be programatically determined and that the states, properties, and values of such components can be programatically determined and possibly set. There is also an implicit assumption about the compatibility between user agents and assistive technologies. Such disconnects or gaps in understanding have resulted in deficiencies in our accessibility testing and evaluation tools.
Developing accessible RIAs is also much more challenging than authoring or generating static web content. WAI-ARIA introduces additional semantic meta data and added keyboard support to facilitate usability - all being applied in a dynamically changing environment. Thus, The accessibility of RIAs changes as the user operates the web page. This added complexity creates the need to add tools to assist the developer in their native IDEs during the development, unit-testing, and functional testing of dynamic web applications.
Static Analysis would require pre-processing and analysis of the JavaScript code to understand the intent. This is not effective or practical. Consequently, the testing strategy for accessibility testing should mirror unit testing where the end user operates a web page based on the design criteria for the product, ideally exercising all aspects of the page. This is when accessibility tools need to be validating the content and they need to do so in response to user interaction and Ajax live area updates. To accomplish this more dynamic valaidation and evaluation, accessibility tools must have an integrated browser component that is event driven and drives compliance testing. The presentation of the test results may vary (depending, for example, upon whether one is using an IDE which provides developer assistance in the enablement effort or a validation test tool), however the sets of validation rules should be reusable regardless of the context in which they are being applied.
It will be the mission of the task force to address these and related issues.
Objectives
- Develop a standard set of accessibility validation rules, geared toward meeting compliance to WCAG 2 using WAI-ARIA and WAI-ARIA Best Practices. These rules must be consumable by major accessibility test tools.
- Develop best practices for reporting accessibility compliance by accessibility test tools
- Develop IDE best practices to assist developers to produce Accessible RIAs
One of the tools that will help model the consumption and execution of validation rules as well as the reporting of violations of these rules in a dynamic environment will be the Eclipse ACTF Web Validation Componentry (Webelo). The aim will be to position Webelo as the open-source reference implementation for the encoding, consumption, and execution of validation rules.
Related Links
- Current work
- Tools that will participate in the specification
- WAI-ARIA Specifications and Resources
- CSUN Pitch Drafts and FINAL version
- Discussions
Participating Companies and Organizations
- Adobe
- Deque
- Fraunhofer Institute
- IBM
- Laszlo Systems
- Microsoft
- ParaSoft
- University of Illinois
Committee Email list
The email list is accessibility@openajax.org. Archives can be found at: http://openajax.org/pipermail/accessibility/. To subscribe to this list, fill out the form at: http://openajax.org/mailman/listinfo/accessibility.
Teleconference information
Wednesdays, weekly, 9am to 10am CST. Please use the World Clock Meeting Planner to check the time and date for your time zone.
Call-in numbers:
- US Toll free: 1-866-457-2759
- Toll: 1-719-387-5502
- Germany Toll free: 0 800 181 6950
Participant Passcode: 990335
IRC information:
- server: irc.mozilla.org
- channel: #oaa-accessibility
Minutes from previous calls
Instructions to post minutes here
1) Click into last minutes posted.
2) Change URL in address line to indicate new date and click go.
3) Edit new page.
4) Add Participants (see previous minutes for attendees' company association) and Minutes/save.
5) Go back to main page/edit mode.
6) Copy/paste previous minutes link and change date/save.
Minutes
- Accessibility Minutes 2009 02 18
- Accessibility Minutes 2009 02 25
- Accessibility Minutes 2009 03 04
- Accessibility Minutes 2009 03 11
- Accessibility Minutes 2009 03 25
- Accessibility Minutes 2009 04 01
- Accessibility Minutes 2009 04 08
- Accessibility Minutes 2009 04 15
- Accessibility Minutes 2009 04 22
- Accessibility Minutes 2009 04 29
- Accessibility Minutes 2009 05 06
- Accessibility Minutes 2009 05 13
- Accessibility Minutes 2009 05 20
- Accessibility Minutes 2009 05 27
- Accessibility Minutes 2009 06 03
- Accessibility Minutes 2009 06 17
- Accessibility Minutes 2009 06 24
- Accessibility Minutes 2009 07 01
- Accessibility Minutes 2009 07 08
- Accessibility Minutes 2009 07 15
- Accessibility Minutes 2009 07 29
- Accessibility Minutes 2009 08 05
- Accessibility Minutes 2009 08 12
- Accessibility Minutes 2009 08 19
- Accessibility Minutes 2009 08 23
- Accessibility Minutes 2009 08 26
- Accessibility Minutes 2009 09 02
- Accessibility Minutes 2009 09 09
- Accessibility Minutes 2009 09 23
- Accessibility Minutes 2009 09 30
- Accessibility Minutes 2009 10 14
- Accessibility Minutes 2009 10 21
- Accessibility Minutes 2009 11 04
- Accessibility Minutes 2009 11 11
- Accessibility Minutes 2009 11 18
- Accessibility Minutes 2009 12 02
- Accessibility Minutes 2009 12 09
- Accessibility Minutes 2010 01 06
- Accessibility Minutes 2010 01 20
- Accessibility Minutes 2010 01 27
- Accessibility Minutes 2010 02 03
- Accessibility Minutes 2010 02 10
- Accessibility Minutes 2010 02 24
- Accessibility Minutes 2010 03 10
