I’ve written and published a new proposed high-level strategy for Mozilla-related accessibility efforts. Note that this is not a detailed roadmap for future work, and not a firm commitment to fund or perform such work. Rather it is intended to provide a context within within which we can make overall decisions about where we should concentrate funding and effort. This is especially important because our resources are very much finite, and we will need to make decisions about what we should do and what we should leave undone or leave to others to do.
This is very much a work in progress, and I’ll be revising this over time to reflect changed circumstances and priorities. I’ve reviewed the document with a number of people involved in Mozilla accessibility efforts, and would be happy to consider further revisions based on public comments.
Finally, note that this document supplements and (to some extent) supercedes my previous posts from 2006 and 2007 on making choice and innovation accessible to all and a proposed vision and strategy for Mozilla accessibility.
David Baron - 2009-04-20 04:33
The document currently says: “Making applications accessible should be a core task of Internet and web developers, as important as improving performance and usability in general.” I think it is also worth emphasizing that the technologies of the Web should be designed so this is as little work as possible. When standard semantic markup can provide the information needed for accessibility, they should be used by assistive technology, rather than making authors have to write something else that means the same thing. The goal should be to make as much information as possible accessible to as many people as possible, not to criticize or demonize authors for their prioritization decisions.
Last week in the “Accessible” module, April 20, 2009 « Marco’s accessibility blog - 2009-04-20 09:12
[…] members, has worked on a new high-level accessibility strategy document. Frank Hecker has a blog post explaining this in greater […]
Scott Rippon (Scott.Rippon@gmail.com) - 2009-04-21 03:52
How does Firefox rate against the W3C User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/uaag.html)? Should compliance with these guidelines be in the strategy? Is Mozilla participating in the development of the UAAG 2.0?
hecker - 2009-04-21 13:04
Scott: This is better addressed in the mozilla.dev.accessibility newsgroup (and I’ll forward your comment there). As noted, the strategy is a living document, and if there’s a consensus that UUAG compliance should be called out in the strategy then we can change it accordingly.