DHTML Accessibility for Mozilla

Aaron Leventhal, the leader of Mozilla Accessibility Project announced better DHTML support for Mozilla in an interview that was published recently. He is not optimistic about XHTML support because Microsoft Internet Explorer keeps using Windows lock-in technology and prevents the technology to be fully developed.

Bazzmann|Mag had the opportunity to interview Leventhal and give an insight into the development and troubles Mozilla had since the start of the project under Netscape till IBM’s current support and vision on the project.

One of the new developments in Mozilla is DHTML accessibility. Leventhal says the following on this: “Up until now, DHTML has not been a real option for developers who care about accessibility. IBM is working to change that, so that developers can create custom DHTML widgets and have them be accessible with the keyboard and assistive technologies. Developers can already do the first part, keyboard accessibility. I’m working on documentation for it – key-navigable custom DHTML widgets, in Mozilla and IE. With Web applications such as Gmail becoming more popular, this is an important area that needs to be addressed. The second part of dynamic content accessibility is going to be the use of additional HTML attributes to describe the role and state of custom widgets. For example, it will be possible to describe a ‘<div>’ as a tree item that is expanded.”

Leventhal does not see a bright future for upcoming standards like XHTML 2, because HTML 1 already gives a lot of problems. “As long as IE doesn’t render true XHTML and make use of namespaces, developers will have to serve XHTML pages with a different mime type in IE vs. Mozilla. I find it unlikely that Microsoft will release a highly standards-compliant browser which supports technologies that reduce lock-in to Windows technologies. I also don’t envision IE becoming irrelevant. However, work to progress the Web to a better design needs to continue and will one day be worth the effort.”

Source: Bazzmann|Mag