Accessible web sites with knockout

[mcoolin]

I often develop sites for the government that require WCAG 2.0 compliance.

Can this be done using Knockout?

[Scott Messinger]

I wish I could help you out...but I don't even know what WCAG 2.0 means....

[Mark Hahn]

http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG/

[Tom Thorp]

In my experience, using knockout is a non-issue with regards to WCAG 2.0 compliance.

I'm also building a large site for my state's government, so I have the same issues.   Knockout primarily is responsible for handling the interaction between data (in viewModel) and the screen presented to users.  In general,it doesn't interact with accessibility issues.  

In my research on  WCAG 2.0 compliance, this issue is primarily handled by layout & structure of the html and attributes on key elements 

[mcoolin]

Our group here seems to think the page should still work eve with JS turned off. That does not make much sense in a web 2.0 world.

[gaffe]

Compliance with disability laws is a big deal for government, see
details here:
http://www.section508.gov/

It is written into every IT contract that all contractors must make
their sites comply. Folks run the risk of compliance people telling
them they cannot use knockout to develop and have to re-write using
alternative technologies.

[gaffe]

Since when do government regulations make sense?

[Tom Thorp]

Normally I would agree with your statement.  But in this case, it is all about making your site accessible to those who are blind (and use screen readers) or those who cannot use a mouse.  As I have friends in these categories, this rule make sense to me.

[giovani....@gmail.com]

Same problem here in Italy. Government Law requires WCAG2.0 compliance for all public websites. 

AFAIK, knockout.js does not support full compliance (yet?) ... 

Anyone ?

[gaffe]

Tom,

I think it is about letting those who are blind be able to navigate and use the sites that are out there.

Change a website instead of changing the screen reader is the worst possible approach to accomplish this goal. First off, it can never really work successfully for a majority of sites because not all websites follow all standards, you can only mandate and control some of them. The far better solution is for screen readers to evolve at the same pace evergreen browsers do.

Why not add up the amount of hours developers spending making sites compliant with these retarded standards and mandate that amount of time to be spent on building a better screen reader instead? That will result in your friends being able to view all sites, instead of just government ones.

These days we have self driving cars and AI. The idea that we should rebuild every website on the internet instead of creating a better way to read things off the screen is in my opinion a very bad idea. It just delays what needs to happen by providing a crappy interm solution that isn't any good instead of solving the problem.

Microsoft has new AI that can look at an image and tell you what it is of. That already works better than relying on alt tags and assuming developers correctly described everything, especially since most things are not tagged at all. Just FYI.

On Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 9:00:15 AM UTC-4, Tom Thorp wrote:

Normally I would agree with your statement.  But in this case, it is all about making your site accessible to those who are blind (and use screen readers) or those who cannot use a mouse.  As I have friends in these categories, this rule make sense to me.,