Jibbering Musings

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.