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Comment by pohl | Hacker News Reader

Aren't you a bit nervous about how they're talking about supporting HTML 5 but they appear to be strategically neglecting section 4.8.11 of the spec?

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Canvas, for those who don't know and don't want to search for it.

The problem with canvas, as correctly identified on the IE blog, is that no-one has yet worked out what to do with it from an accessibility perspective. Other browsers just report it to screen-readers (and other similar technologies) as a graphical block, whereas it obviously contains a lot more crucial information than that, and there's no standard for how that should be represented.

This has always been Microsoft's excuse: there aren't clear standards, and it's definitely partially true.

But they seem to be the only one of all the other substantial browsers (Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera) that just isn't even close. Why don't they just try what Firefox does? Make all our lives a little easier for once...

Probably because Mozilla and Opera aren't easy targets for lawsuits from disability groups and governments in the same way that Microsoft has a bullseye painted on it.

Maybe ... but they are very serious about accessibility, going back to at least when they did the NT rollout in San Francisco where they made sure to put in everyone's hands a short paper on the subject.

If someone could point out where they've clearly used accessibility as an excuse vs. being truly serious about it I'd be interested.

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