Making Accessibile SVG by Dean Jackson
Well attended, about 50 people, Dean apologises it wasn’t better prepared, but he’d spent the night getting the SVG 1.2 spec out.
- SVG folks are fanatical
- In AUS Gents for toilets in Swedish - gents in 50 languages, In canada, just a picture.
- Accessibility is about allowing the most number of people to view your SVG
- who’s it for, everyone, Visual impairment, Audio impairment, learning difficulties, motor difficulties, others e.g. Google.
- W3 takes Accessibility seriously.
- Graphics is the last frontier of universal accessibility.
- What is multimedia at the moment - images, ausio, animation, most stuff on the web is useless, inaccessible - generally need visual ability, and motor control.
- W3 does PNG, HTML, SVG, no audio, no video, SMIL and SVG for animation.
- WAI and SVG - WCAG, ATAG, UAAG review it all.
- SVG is more accessible as it’s vector, it’s textual, and SVG stuff.
- infinite zoomability, componentize SVG elements into groups which can be described.
- SVG is text, view-source etc.
- title, desc, metadata in SVG, what’s missing, structure, references, alternative equivalents.
- SVG text is really text.
- Seperating content/presentation - tough in SVG, stylable with CSS/XSL, user style sheets.
- SVG DOM makes SVG more Accessible!! Thanks for saying this Dean - should help me make the anti-Shadow Tree arguments on RCC
- SVG G element allows you to group elements, define presentation order, use element, etc.
- Try to use semantically rich language for as long as possible, just use SVG for the rendering - use RAX/RCC stick it in the metadata element etc.
- Is Scripting evil? - Device independent events - focusin, focusout, activate.
- Demo of clock, loads of circles to make animated script, DESCRIPTION element in group contains the updating time the same as the clock morphs.
- Shows the W3 logo, the text is text, and inside the SVG doc, is lots of descriptions, telling you all about the image including fonts etc.
- Demos SVG2HTML XSLT (see W3 site
Tips:
- Use TITLE/DEFS.
- use xlink:title
- structure content
- text as text
- don’t copy elements, use USE.
- watch out for colour blindness.
- Provide control over animation.
- Use your common sense!
- Think about writing a program to get to it.
- The future - Semantic meaning, seperate DOM/rendering, navigation/selecting, usability
- What should we do? - SVG spec will always allow people to make inaccessible. WCAG, UAAG requirements from WAI
- Ronan Oger asks which countries have laws:
- In AUS websites must comply with WCAG 1.0 (Dean doesn’t say A or AAA) - In reality few do, especially with graphics.
- Ronan asks how do we encourage our clients to allow us to author accessibility.
- Cost can be minimal if you do it from the start.