[TYPO3-hci] Kickoff: TYPO3 4.1 (suggestions)

[Christopher]

Dmitry Dulepov wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> Lars Thalheim wrote:
>> I think accessibility in terms of personal disabilities for BE is to be
>> taken with a grain of salt. Someone who has disabilities which make it
>> nessessary to have an accessible BE (eg. limited eye-sight), might most
>> likely not use the BE anyway.
>>
>> In other words. When designing a planes cockpit, I don't need to take 
>> into
>> real account to make the steeringstick accessible for people without 
>> arms...
>> because those people will MOST LIKELY never be pilot.
>>
>> Therefore I suppose to define "accessibility" in BE as "userfriendly". 
>> This
>> might make work a little easier.
> 
> Completely agree with all above.
> 

I don't.

IMO, this rests on a misunderstanding of what's actually required to 
make a page/application accessible in the first place.

Building a minimally accessible application is extremely simple (ajax/js 
notwithstanding--more on this a bit later). Read through the WCAG 
Priority 1, 2 and 3 checklists [1]--there isn't really anything much in 
any of them that's not part of garden-variety web-page building with the 
one very big exception of item 6.3 [2], and even in this case, I suspect 
the BE could be built to 'fall back' on the existing page-refreshing 
model when javascript is not present.

But in any case, even if we were to decide to ignore item 6.3 
altogether, the core parts of the BE could probably be made to comply, 
without much difficulty, with all of WCAG 1 and 2 and most of 3--meeting 
as many guidelines as possible is definitely the preferable course.

Plus, given that there is some interest in expanding TYPO3's userbase 
into government and public institutions, accessibility will have to be 
pursued at some point or other--and it'd be best to do it during the 
4.5-5.0 refactoring instead of rebuilding everything twice!


-Christopher

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/full-checklist.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/wai-pageauth.html#tech-scripts