Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Accessible SVG is closer than you think

[Firstly, my apologies for not blogging more often (blame twitter). I have a number of unpublished blogs that I've let get stale so I'm going try not to save unpublished blogs anymore. We'll see how that goes. Anyways, here's one I probably should have written late last year...]

Sometime in early December, Aaron pinged me to discuss the topic of SVG accessibility. This led to a quick Firefox experiment (tweeted here) using the cutting edge HTML5 parser and WAI-ARIA. Note this demo is especially uninteresting if you don't use a screen reader. Long story short, it works and will work even better with a little gecko love. Web developers that have already invested in learning ARIA can apply this knowledge to SVG elements, add some JavaScript, and have a pretty striking and accessible application. Note: please don't look to my experiment for "striking" visuals... that's just not my thing... you have to use your imagination here.

I wonder, given the momentum HTML5 canvas currently has in the web developer playground, if the ability to inline SVG in HTML will breathe new life into SVG? As far as accessibility goes, it is certainly something for which I can hope.

Oh and if someone wants to fix up my demo, feel free, and please drop me a line... and I'll link to yours. I'm a total SVG noob.