While browsers are free, the AT isn’t. AT works at a much deeper level with the computer than most people realise. When we say <input type=“button” />, we associate it with this gray square usually (in Windows). Surely your dtd doesn’t hold that information, it is something programmed in the browser background processes. AT hooks into software at an architectural level, on Windows its MSAA. So if HTML5 pushes something new, and doesnt hook on at that MSAA level, that cool feature is… useless to AT users. Even people who make AT because there is nothing to grab onto, it is just pretty pixels oOo. Sites like gmail were essentially useless for blind users for a year or more because all these AJAX stuff produce nothing till after load. I would like the W3C take ahold of JavaScript versus HTML5, then there could be better support.
Off Topic:
Who owns JS? Netscape! They died in 1996 or something
As for those who can’t upgrade, this is mostly in a workplace, and if those employees have special requirements for assistive technologies, it is up to the workplace to provide those, not the user.
Huh? The workplace does by US law if in US. Agencies tend to take several months to several years to upgrade stuff like browsers. Testing AT is one of those things. While AT products may not update for a year, it may take an agency longer to jump from IE 7 to 8.
Again though, if the workplace doesn’t provide equipment capable of interpreting a modern website, that isn’t the fault of the website. You can apply the same analogy to many other things in life as well. Equipment becomes obsolete over time, and that includes software. I’m not going to restrict what I develop (within reason & context) because I know some places are unwilling to move on from ancient equipment - no progress would ever be made!
That’s not to say I willingly disregard anyone who isn’t using bang up to date software of course - just that when the figures drop below a certain level, I don’t see the need to continue supporting those users.
This is partly true. Yeah…some workplace have a very strict restrictions on software updates/installation. However, for Anti-IT (my parents… in-laws… some of my friends) doesn’t even know how to update IE. Sadly, they will always remain w/ the browser that came w/ the OS. The day IE 9 will be effective is when Windows XP dead for at least 1~2 years… I don’t see XP going away for very long time.
I believe he is very good at what he is doing but the way he proves his point are very similar to Charlie Sheen. Still, he has valid points but should respect other people’s opinion as well. There’s not always one answer to everything.
If by that you mean WCAG 1.0, not 2.0 – and frankly their ‘section 9’ never made any sense anyhow; I can see imagemaps, but what was their justification for accesskeys and tabindex other than “we don’t like them”?
Most of the complaints about either of them more being that people use them wrong than with the elements themselves… That could be true of anything.
You know I’ve thought about this issue often and I do understand that workplaces supporting even a handful of machines can be tied to a particular browser due to their dependancy on a particular piece of software that harness’ IE6 or some such issue however there is little reason even technology iliterate people can’t upgrade their browsers. Even Windows XP will prompt the user to upgrade to 7/8 and takes them through the upgrade holding their hand every step of the way and that’s just part of the regular updates. They don’t have to do anything but have their windows updates on and have a genuine license for Windows.
Mind you, that only gets you up to IE8 on Windows XP so no HTML5 which I think is a poor decision on Microsoft’s part.
Especially with large swaths of the population (at least in the US) having 768 as the average broadband and in many places (northern NH, the Dakota’s) having 33.6 dailup as a good day (60 miles north of me in Coos County for example)-- bye-bye windows update; it’s one of the first things even non-saavy users turn off as it becomes more annoyance than help.
Didn’t say it was smart, just said it was common. Do you really think a user still stuck on dialup, on metered connections like Hughsnet, or semi-metered like our friends down in Oz have to deal with; where they get 3mbps the first gig and then 384kbps from that point on REALLY are going to be all that interested in downloading serveral hundred megs a month of updates?
… and there are places that will likely never see broadband – at least not 3mbps/faster; the population density is too low for it – see the US more than 30 miles out from the suburbs.
It’s easy for those of us sitting here with 22mbps downstreams who see nothing wrong with a half-a-gig update for a MMO to go “turn of automatic updates? That’s stupid!” – but not everyone can afford faster than 768kbps, and it’s just not available to a LOT of people.
It happens automatically in the background, and hardly makes a dent on my bandwidth. It’s totally unnoticeable. I don’t see it as any reason to turn it off just because it takes a while to download.
This comes as (another) surprise for me! You really mean you aren’t aware that there is a CONSISTENT part of the machines not getting automatic updates?
Leaving aside what Jason said, the fact that there are many who just simply can’t afford the bandwidht to let automatic updates on (and yes, the illustration is more than accurate), I, for example, manage (part of) an Intranet. In our Intranet, there are two things that stop us form getting automatic updates:
Not all machines have Internet access. All machines use the Internet line to access Intranet remote servers, but not all can surf the net.
The update policy is “let the update prove to be flawless first”. Meaning we just don’t give our self to the mercy of “maybe this update won’t screw up my machine” litany. There are many incidents in the past, and the importance of an ALWAYS functional system is too big to just let an untested update be installed.
As a personal note, I started off on the Internet with 2-4kbs land line, before 2k, and then upgraded to a 124kbp VERY EXPENSIVE mobile line sometime near 2k1.
The 15mbs I have now is only a year old, from switching the ISP, and in 2007 I only had 1mbs.
It’s not unconceivable to me that my history with ISPs is reapeating now in different parts of the world. Also, it’s not unconceivable to me many have ONLY mobile Internet access with restrictions like the ones Jason pointed out, or landlines Internet access with the same restrictions.
All in all, it’s just narrow minded to believe EVERYONE will get IE8 just because Microsoft is providing automatic updates. If this would be the case, IE6 would be long gone and a non-issues in web dev, which we all know it’s not the case.
It’s starting too look up, and I personally stopped from considering IE6 in my web dev, but IE7, and, even more, IE8 will play a part in our web dev concerns much longer than you make it sound like.
One sollution may be Google Chrome Frame - Google Code, but turning IE into Chrome is not that much of a bless. The hype surrounding Chrome: fastest, sercure etcetera is just a hype. If you start HTML5 and CSS3 web dev in Chrome you’ll see it’s pretty much a frustrating experience sometimes. And the fact that you can’t control the instalation of Chrome out of the box, says plenny to Intranet environment as to be counted out as an option.
JAWS already has the ; (semicolon) key for listing ARIA landmark roles… works in my JAWS10, which is two versions too old! NVDA, Window-Eyes, the last few versions of these have a key ready for landmark roles and navigation with them so that’s all cool now.
But then JAWS 10 works with FF which I found I prefer… but if you’re using anything older than 9, you’re pretty much stuck with IE. And you don’t get landmark roles.
So I will emphasise Ryan’s point about updates not being free: they aren’t when you need to update a €1000 piece of software. (Now, GWMicro has some thing where you buy the software and get like 3 free updates, which I think is pretty cool). Hopefully word will continue to spread about free readers like NVDA (which is nice to use if you’re a JAWS user because many of the quick keys are the same).
Maybe, whenever Chrome gets around to building an Accessibility framework into their browser that actually works with any current screen reader. I dunno why Google is being so obstinate with this.
And people upgrading from XP? I think that’s VERY optimistic.
I believe the lifetime for IE8 will indeed be VERY long simply because Microsoft decided 9 wouldn’t run on it. People will not automatically go buy some new license just to upgrade to Vista or 7.
More people are going to get those new OSes through purchase of new machines rather than updates of old ones. Especially since Windows isn’t free.
[ot]Heck we bought a laptop (in a Dutch computer shop) which, for whatever reason, came with an English copy of Windows on it (and no disk). We didn’t care because we were going to slap some Linux on there anyway.
However at some point we needed to run a piece of Windows software and a neighbour had a copy of Windows 7 (or Vista I forget which… whatever was on the computer we bought) and turns out the license wasn’t any good… because the neighbour’s copy was in Dutch.
Seriously wtf you have to buy an entire new OS just to switch languages?? [/ot]
I don’t know anyone (I’m including the office where I work, which is all Windows) who has it on. Why? The darned things kept slowing the computers down updating stuff nobody understood like Java updates (seriously why do they have Java on those machines!) so everyone turned them off. Is that a good idea? No, but I’m just saying, lots of people keep that off.
It happens automatically in the background, and hardly makes a dent on my bandwidth. It’s totally unnoticeable. I don’t see it as any reason to turn it off just because it takes a while to download.
Apparently the girls upstairs (who need to work while clients are on the phone) found it much too slow. Maybe our tubes are full : )
Don’t forget all of Canada has these bandwidth caps everyone’s so pissed about, lawlz.
But… they still don’t. And then there are those places run by a BOFH. No Firefox, Opera or Chrome for them.
I did manage to convince my uncle to use the Dinosaur head instead of the E (he’s on Windows 98) but that’s mostly because he’s in the States using AOL (yikes!) and IE5 can’t render AOL’s main page anymore, while “the Dinosaur head” (Mozilla, not Firefox) can. Lawlz.
Quoted for truth.
Nah Mozilla owns/runs/updates it now. There’s like an ECMAscript 5 out there… and! IE9 is gonna support it! Wow! (none of that is sarcasm, I’m very happy to hear this!)
This is a valid point of view. And HTML5 is a valid option for many developers, especially when they are dropping support for browsers like IE6 (and in some places, 7).
For me, however, it’s discrimination (blocking or making it too difficult for people because of their AT/software/bandwidth/etc which for me is the same as blocking people because of physical disabilities) so where I’m at, professionally, HTML5 is still simply not an option. I am eager to use the new stuff as it comes when it works in the browsers and software I have to support, and I expect I might be able to use more HTML5 stuff in a year or two (form inputs mostly… because IE6-8 have no issue with those). I would love to use more distinguished tag name to select-by-element in both Javascript and CSS, would love to use the new form elements as soon as possible, and I can see why developers are excited about it (along with all the NEWT stuff).
Wish that was the reason why it’s hard to upgrade. Honestly, there’s nothing tie to IE 6 for software. It’s more about Network guys think it’s a security issue… Of course… updates would give you better “security” but they are more worry about people calling them that their system didn’t update and crashed their system…
Err… no. Not only do MANY software titles tie to Trident directly for rendering, many of them break upgrading to IE7/Later.
M$ did something that was WAY ahead of it’s time – they made the rendering engine for IE (trident) available as a direct callable API you could use to run programs – much akin to how XULRunner works. You can make a Trident rendering instance in any win32 programming language with just a couple lines of code…
In a real laugh, some older versions of Antivirus from both Nortons and McAfee used Trident to render their dialogs. (swing and a miss…)
Not only are many older business crapplets from 8 to 10 years ago that companies rely on tied to a specific version of trident, you ALWAYS have the over-eager who use “undocumented” windows calls that are undocumented for a REASON - that reason being M$ could change how they work at any time. The changes in trident and it’s API often fit that bill, though that’s been a problem for M$ with every OS upgrade… and why some software (like Quake II) run as flawless on x64 7 as they did win98, others can’t run on anything newer than ME despite being “32 bit windows programs”.
… and that’s before we talk activeX plugins that are ‘broken’ – really it boils down to Visual Basic programmers will be the death of us all…
From not just a web developer, but an application developer-end, Internet Explorer really makes me cry. The odd thing is I’ve tried to figure out why Microsoft insists on keeping Internet Explorer. I can’t find any substantially marketable reason why they insist on maintaining IE. I can’t imagine it generates a stand-alone profit.
Yeah, me either… I was thinking about that this morning in light of the IE9 release which is probably the best IE yet but… Yawn… I can’t get excited about it because it means nothing to the massive amount of Windows users who are still sticking with Windows XP.
My bank has some massive super-expensive decade-old Java beast running with IE6 right now. I figure they’ll upgrade the browsers when it’s time to upgrade that whole Java thing…
X a bazillion banks and offices in the finance sector.
I think this time, you misread my quotes. I was referring to Corporation policy in upgrading the OS. In the past, I worked for a company that is between 20,000~200,000 people. We were all in the mercy of network admins who decides what you can install and when you should upgrade the OS. For whatever reason, they always panicked when someone mentions the word “upgrade”. I do know that some application may only be compatible to IE6 but this was clearly NOT the reason why network admins would wave the wave flag w/ the title “Security Alert”. What’s really weird is that they would let us install Firefox but not upgrade IE specifically. At work, I’ve met many people who say “Why do I need to upgrade IE? It works great now so what for?”. I even had the most ridiculous requirements… I had to make the site IE 6 compatible because there weren’t enough man power to upgrade the OS for the entire company… um…yeah… true story.