Mitch11's Celebration Blog

I was trying to make sense of these issues, reported in 2020 against ARIA in HTML : Incorrect or confusing description of aria-required usage #225 Other aria-* attributes which should not be allowed on HTML elements #241 My understanding of strong native semantics was hand-wavy, so I scrutinized the ARIA spec . It gives us an interlocking set of requirements for web authors, ARIA conformance checkers, user agents, and the host language itself (usually HTML, but could be SVG or MathML). To help myself understand the subtleties, I reorganized and rephrased these requirements in more formal language. Words in [square brackets] are my additions, but otherwise these are direct quotes from  ARIA spec 1.2 (Working Draft 18 December 2019), section 8.5, Conflicts with Host Language Semantics . How ARIA handles conflicts with a host language The ARIA spec's requirements for a host language spec (e.g, ARIA in HTML) [8.5.1 Attribute Conflicts:] Host languages MUST explicitly declare where the...

It's been a month now since we moved from the San Francisco Bay Area to Berlin. It's easy to read the news and compare the vastly different per capita COVID statistics by city or region or country, but it's taking me a while to get a handle on what's really going on here. Obviously Germany is mostly open. Business and schools and many organizations have been busy. I've seen this at street level both in Berlin and in Saxony. Now I'm trying to reconcile my contradictory impressions. Sometimes it seems people are following the rules quite closely, yet at other times people's safety behaviors vary rather widely. My insight today is that people aren't actually following the rules -- they're following leaders' interpretations of the rules. Whoever is in charge of a restaurant, a family gathering, or a church sets the norms and everybody else mostly follows suit. Role models are more important than signage. Meanwhile, as far as I can tell tracking and t...

Today after breakfast I took a walk in my Berlin neighborhood. I saw many homes, some businesses, and some public gathering places. I saw two glass collection locations, and I wondered if they would appear on a map. My first search result was Glas entsorgen – Entsorgen.org . The first commenter was a person with a disability seeking a pickup service for his glass recycling. This story so far portrays the tangential tendencies of my ADHD brain. Others have told this story before! Here's a fun version: Hal replacing a lightbulb (YouTube autoplay, 42 seconds) . Fortunately, before I went to bed last night, I chose my goal for today: to categorize and prioritize the whole world of unsolved accessibility problems, with a focus on technology. Does that sound unrealistic? Well, I believe I can harness my creativity to tame this complexity. In fact, I can use this morning's tangential topic for my ambitious goal today. The commenter's need for a recycling pickup service is ...

We visited the Lutheran church on Müllerstraße today in Zehlendorf. Today is the Sunday commemorating baptism. We sat in singles in pairs with social distance. The congregation is older than we are and equally white. A few people had evident disabilities. The pastor is engaging. His speech and movement convey energy. The sermon started with the idea of Erwaehlung — I tried to look it up in Google Translate, then I got Silke's help. "Gott liebt mich grundlos." The pastor connects the traditional Lutheran message to our contemporary world. Examples: it's a mistake to play on a computer to avoid feeling pain. He said something about #BlackLivesMatter but as a language learner I didn't understand the context. I went in with low expectations of understanding everything, then the experience beat my expectations — I understood 75% of everything spoken. Du oder Sie? I know we say Du to God. Does God say Du to me? The organist today played the hymns clearly an...

Are companies using WCAG for non-web software? Short answer: Yes! This is important for standards education. The question came up because I recommended that the WCAG-EM Report Tool  not hard-code the words "websites" and "web pages" into its reports. I said the tool should also include suitable language for non-web software, such as mobile apps. Personally I've written a lot of WCAG reports in VPAT format for non-web software, but I wondered... Is this my weird specialty, or is it common? So I asked the Internet. I looked at the ten biggest digital companies because I had a hunch they might publish their VPAT reports online for all to see. I was right — after a few simple web searches, I found six out of ten of these large companies publishing their VPAT reports online. A few clicks later, I had the data I was looking for. Five out of six  large technology companies have published at least one VPAT report for non-web software. I was disappointe...

Thank you to Irfan Ali and Janina Sajka for starting the Spoken Pronunciation Task Force in the W3C Accessible Platform Architectures (APA) Working Group. As an accessibility professional, amateur linguist, and person with a cognitive disability , I'm offering this blog post as a perspective and a starting point for discussion. What would happen if we use lexical markup in HTML for improving pronunciation in text to speech (TTS)? Lexical markup specifies the lexeme of a word or phrase, not its phonemes. Lexical markup can help language learners as a basis for more efficient translation. Lexical markup can help end users with cognitive disabilities through more accurate presentation of lexical synonyms (PDF) or conversion to simplified language . Existing W3C standards already offer lexical markup as a basis for pronunciation. In the Pronunciation Lexicon Specification (PLS) and Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) , the role attribute and token element provide this capa...