SVG: Accessible Forms

["~:'' ありがとうございました"]

SVG: Accessible Forms

What action is being taken to develop an accessible input form** for  
SVG?
        can and will it be implemented by UA developers?
        how long will we have to wait?
        will it be easy for authors to use?

regards

Jonathan Chetwynd

**Input forms are the primary means that users have to purposefully  
and intentionally input information.

a keyboard navigable input form in SVG:
http://www.honte.eu/register/registerTab.svg
tested in Opera and Mozilla
nb xforms have not been used.
Improvements including generalisations that ease implementation for  
other authors, would be very welcome!

the SVG example from the XForms test suite has only very partially  
been implemented by the popular browsers:
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Forms/Test/XForms1.1/Edition1/Appendix/H/h.3.xhtml
        It is not clear to me at least, that the specifications and example  
given are sufficiently explicit that conforming browsers would all  
display near identically, there are currently rather significant  
differences.
        furthermore it is significantly harder for an author to implement  
than html forms.
        Do Xforms need to be explicitly focusable?
                my example uses anchors....

["~:'' ありがとうございました"]

Chaals,

thanks for yet another well considered and easy-to-read response*!
your comments around ARIA and SVG are noted.

however you fail to address the central issue, which as Filipe Sanches  
wrote me in a private email, and which I believe correctly states the  
case:

> Implementing it is not trivial and that is why this kind of thing  
> should be available as a general module. Preferably as part of the  
> spec in order to get it into every UA.

my query was intended to address this issue in particular. ie as to  
why whereas accessible html forms had been around for about a decade,  
accessible svg forms remain extremely hard to implement.
SVG1.1 has now been implemented by many UA and browsers, but still  
miss this vital  "user"  functionality.

There is a structural fault in the W3C process, and that is why  
process are copied into this thread.
in a sense this is a continuation of a previous thread** on that theme.

I would appreciate it, if you would consider further and respond.

regards

Jonathan Chetwynd


** http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2009Mar/0065.html

 >> On being humane

I claim that developers and in particular the large corporations that  
fund w3c have undue influence.
The result is a failure to include users in, and put them at the  
centre of the w3c specification process,
....


*unfortunately, your reply never reached me, possibly due to your edit?

[Charles McCathieNevile-2]

On Wed, 02 Sep 2009 15:38:00 +0600, ~:'' ありがとうございました  
<j.chetwynd@...> wrote:

> Chaals,
>
> thanks for yet another well considered and easy-to-read response*!
> your comments around ARIA and SVG are noted.
>
> however you fail to address the central issue, which as Filipe Sanches  
> wrote me in a private email, and which I believe correctly states the  
> case:
>
>> Implementing it is not trivial and that is why this kind of thing  
>> should be available as a general module. Preferably as part of the spec  
>> in order to get it into every UA.
>
> my query was intended to address this issue in particular. ie as to why  
> whereas accessible html forms had been around for about a decade,  
> accessible svg forms remain extremely hard to implement.

Because for SVG there was nothing formal like ARIA until now. There was  
the idea foreshadowed in the svg-access note[1] a decade ago of using  
metadata to tag objects - this dates from the very early days of what  
became ARIA, in discussions with Lisa Seeman of UBAccess and Rich  
Schwerdtfeger of IBM who followed this work through the spec editing  
process that eventually got us ARIA.

There was also work on using Xforms, for example the experimental work of  
X-smiles and the work of Sebastian Schnitzenbaumer. Unfortunately that  
never got traction for a variety of reasons (not least the failure of  
XHTML, meaning that little effort was made to develop better tools for the  
public to create content).

Effectively this was because there were not enough people working actively  
on making SVG accessible - so we are not much further ahead than we were 8  
years ago. Given the new and renewed interest in SVG by people who  
understand accessibility, I expect to see much more progress in the next 2  
years.

> SVG1.1 has now been implemented by many UA and browsers, but still miss  
> this vital  "user"  functionality.

Yes. So we are only now arriving at the stage of making this really  
possible. With ARIA in the spec, and with at least Opera working on  
implementation, it should become possible.

> There is a structural fault in the W3C process, and that is why process  
> are copied into this thread.

I think that should be a seperate thread - fixing the process and fixing  
the SVG problem are things that need to be done by different people.  
Mixing the two is likely to lead to more discussion about process and less  
action on anything :(

cheers

Chaals

--
Charles McCathieNevile  Opera Software, Standards Group
     je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg lærer norsk
http://my.opera.com/chaals       Try Opera: http://www.opera.com