CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@MoritzGlantz @marcus I mean, you could help improve the tutorials, but I don’t know how that would work after W3C/WAI has dissolved the Education and Outreach WG (EOWG). They have kneecapped educational material at WAI a lot, now staff has to do it without a WG to back them up, and hence it is all slow.

@MoritzGlantz @marcus There is nothing to do apart from complaining to the working group.

@MoritzGlantz @marcus How would that be published on the W3C site and done by the ARIA WG? That’s what gives it the credibility. Forking it will just create another resource that won’t be kept up.

@marcus @MoritzGlantz This is a political issue, not an effort issue. You would need to convince ARIA WG that it needs to change. But it does what ARIA wants, so there is no incentive to make changes.

Confession time: I am (part of) the reason the ARIA Practices Guide looks so deceptively authoritative.[0]

When I worked on the @w3c / @wai accessibility tutorials[1], we were approached by the ARIA people to write an ARIA tutorial. Now, the tutorials did already make use of ARIA in enhancing native controls. (1/4)

So, that’s the story of how I kinda butterfly-effected the APG (in its current form) in existance. My bad!

[0] See @stefan’s article here: https://www.stefanjudis.com/notes/notes-on-relying-on-the-aria-authoring-practices-guide/ (warning: unstoppable animation when leaving the tab in the background too long) or @aardrian’s article here: https://adrianroselli.com/2019/02/uncanny-a11y.html#APG
[1] https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/
[2] https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/button/
[3] https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/forms/custom-controls/ (4/4)

APG was a spec-looking Group note back in the day, and after we asked for more HTML-based guidance, enhancing instead of replacing native elements, the APG was later relaunched in the form it is today. As a tutorial-like resource, that looks like it could be part of the WAI website, despite being a Working Group resource.

(Needless to say that they are using a lot of graphics and icons, elements that are great for readers but have never been really prioritized on the main WAI site.) (3/4)

Their proposal started with what became the “Button Pattern”[2], basically how to make a div a fully functional button. This did not mesh with what we wanted for the tutorials at all: We wanted to show how easy it can be to use the platform directly. That’s the reason the wacky “Custom Controls”[3] page exists. (2/4)

@hdv Just ask Copilot to do it!

@tante @lexfri Oh, Fr_i_dman’s characterization is spot on. Fuck that guy

@tante FYI, the podcaster you want to mention is “Lex Fridman”, not “Lex Friedman”, aka @lexfri, who is certainly not right-wing

Here’s a song about it, too: https://lexfriedman.com/friedman

I love how this is the example that Deque uses in their latest “one click accessibility” advertisement. Sure the best alternative text under the heading of the recipe name is “recipe name dish”. Good job AI!

Also why is the heading a div and the rest of the code also terrible? “One click” accessibility my ass.