Summary

Martin Kliehm and I will be holding a core conversation on WAI-ARIA at next week's SXSW called, Get Rich, Remain Accessible. The conversation will take place at the Austin Convention Center on Sunday 9th March between 3:30 pm and 4:30 pm. What aspects of ARIA would you like to talk to us about?

Author: Gez Lemon

Contents

Popularity Contest

The panels at this year's SXSW Interactive Conference and Festival were decided from the number of weighted votes using a panel picker. Martin and I submitted an idea for a panel, but unfortunately, there wasn't enough interest for our panel idea to be selected. There was, however, enough interest for us to be invited to hold a core conversation.

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Core Conversation

This is the first year that core conversations have been held at SXSW, so we're after as much advice as we can get on how to prepare for it. The organisers suggest a format of a 5-7 minute introductory presentation that will hopefully stimulate conversation from the attendees. To that end, it would be great if we could have a good cross range of people at the core conversation - from people who have never heard of ARIA, but want to ensure their work is as accessible as it can be, to people that are working on the specifications and early implementers. If you fall into any of these categories, we would really appreciate your help.

The organisers at SXSW also suggest that people holding a core conversation should gather a list of frequently asked questions. WAI maintain a list of Frequently Asked Questions on ARIA, but I was wondering what you would be interested in asking or talking about. Even if you're not going to be at the core conversation, it would be great to hear the type of things you would like to talk about, or what questions you have about ARIA. Hopefully, we'll see you there.

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Category: Accessibility.

Comments

  1. [ariacoreconversation#comment1]

    Hi,
    Unfortunately i cant be at this conference. I think it lacks of working examples on behalf on the wai-aria recommendations. The documents of the w3 group are not very clear and difficult to read/understand. An other problem is, which applications can interpreting role attributes? And what about applications who ignore those attributes. Which doc type to use? or required? what is about validation? There are a lot of unclear points.

    Have a nice day,
    Armand

    Posted by Armand on

  2. [ariacoreconversation#comment2]

    Hi Gez,

    Sorry, I won't be able to attend your discussion. But here are some sample questions that people might ask:

    - What is ARIA?

    - Can you show us some examples?

    - What are the pros and cons of ARIA as you see them?

    - Does ARIA provide any mainstream benefit? Accessibility-only solutions are often not used correctly, and authors often ignore the solutions if they do not provide a mainstream benefit. So why use it?

    - What kind of vendor support does ARIA have? Who supports it?

    - What techniques work right now?

    - What are the basic steps for building an accessible widget with ARIA?

    - What is ARIA live region markup?

    - How do these "polite", "assertive", or "rude" live attribute values work? Do they correlate to attributes in people?

    - What's the deal with ARIA and namespaces? Can you explain it to us? Do you agree with Doug Schepers take on it: http://www.schepers.cc/?p=46

    - What are JavaScript widgets?

    - I know keyboard support is vital for widgets. How is that best implemented?

    - Didn't Charles Chen developed a JavaScript framework to enhance the accessibility of AJAX-based applications? How does that work? Do you recommend it?

    - Are there other frameworks? Do you recommend them?

    - Would you consider ARIA to be progressive enhancement?

    - Is ARIA backwards compatibility?

    - Does ARIA contribute to code bloat?

    - Is ARIA a long term solution or a stop gap measure?

    - Can ARIA help make HTML 5 accessible?

    - Related question from the public-html-comment list: "How does HTML 5 integrate with the Accessible Rich Internet Applications specification?"
    http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-comments/2008Mar/0000.html

    - Can you trouble shoot my messed up code for me?

    - Can I really get rich by using ARIA?

    Best of luck on your core discussion.

    Posted by Laura on

  4. [ariacoreconversation#comment4]

    I hope that the talks can clear up some of teh points Armond makes because those were my questions as well.

    Posted by Tom on

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