"Reaction [beta]"
AJAX accessible soon 2 Feb 2007
Exciting news from Juicy Studio: "Many of the accessibility issues associated with AJAX will be solved by the live regions concept from the WAI-ARIA suite. Live regions allow assistive technologies, such as screen readers, to be informed of updates without losing their place in the content."
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1 comment so far
Nelson 2 Feb 2007 06:11 PM
This sounds really cool - though I have to confess the spec over at Juicy still seems a little complicated (despite their great work spelling it out)! Hopefully its usage and purpose will become clearer as the draft is refined.
I, for one, know that accessibility is often an issue when proposing slick widgets to my clients - and I'm frequently forced to degrade the experience so that the solution accommodates all folk. Often this means introducing more steps or optional fields (which seems kinda counter-intuitive to me!)
How cool would it be if we could actually service all users with our optimised designs, rather than having to always bring it back to basics (old skool HTML forms)! Let's just hope those responsible for producing assistive technologies get their tools to adhere to the standard too.