Comments on: Legacy defeats consistency in IE 8’s Web 2.0 accessibility effort

By: Microsoft listens, and addresses WAI-ARIA concerns « Access Garage

Microsoft listens, and addresses WAI-ARIA concerns « Access Garage — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 20:00:38 +0000

[...] listens, and addresses WAI-ARIA concerns A while back we wrote that Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 was not using standard syntax for WAI-ARIA properties. The syntax actually varied depending on the mode chosen for the page, which was confusing. [...]

By: aaronlev

aaronlev — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 09:21:59 +0000

Yes, they have fixed it, as mentioned on Ars:
http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2008/12/16/microsoft-sends-out-another-ie8-build-to-testers

By: James

James — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 05:12:11 +0000

So does the latest IE8 private RC fix this?

Accessibility-ARIA: ARIA attribute names containing dashes, such as “aria-checked”, no longer have to be referenced by their camelCased equivalent (ariaChecked) in IE 7 Mode and Quirks Mode. As a consequence of this change, the camelCased syntax no longer exists for these attributes.

By: WebAIM: Blog - ARIA momentum and Internet Explorer

WebAIM: Blog - ARIA momentum and Internet Explorer — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 18:34:08 +0000

[...] will not provide great technical detail into what Microsoft is doing (Aaron Leventhal has provided the details), but in short, there are two major differences in the IE8 implementation of ARIA when compared to [...]

By: IE8 and Standards | A Blog by Web Developers Against IE | Microsoft Internet Explorer

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 16:19:30 +0000

[...] Aaron Leventhal recently blogged about how ARIA in IE8 is a pain. (Aaron works for IBM making Firefox and Web applications accessible and is a member of the W3C PF [...]

By: Ajaxian » IE8 and Standards

Ajaxian » IE8 and Standards — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 10:27:00 +0000

[...] Aaron Leventhal recently blogged about how ARIA in IE8 is a pain. (Aaron works for IBM making Firefox and Web applications accessible and is a member of the W3C PF [...]

By: Jon Gibbins

Jon Gibbins — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 22:29:11 +0000

The work going into ARIA from different camps is really promising. I’ve long wanted to see assistive technology vendors, browser vendors and the W3C come together to work towards better accessibility standards.

It’s a shame to see these legacy issues causing a problem now, when progress seems to be good. I’ll freely admit to being unaware of all the issues involved, but I cannot imagine that it is a difficult task to put this right. Too long have web developers had to yield to these inconsistencies.

By: aaronlev

aaronlev — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 15:00:43 +0000

Well, we can look at it for the standard, but I don’ t think it will work for author-defined properties.

By: SneakyWho_am_i

SneakyWho_am_i — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 13:59:34 +0000

But yes, if they could get it included in the standard, it would be nice, and a Good Thing (registered trademark).

Also, I’m quite proud of my second paragraph there, which is two or arguably only one sentence/s. Lexical might!

By: SneakyWho_am_i

SneakyWho_am_i — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 13:52:23 +0000

This is stupid.

I guess I can concede that the camelCasing is a cool feature, It’s not often that I can say that about ie.. Using css filters to set opacity is particularly stupid. Having all kinds of weird proprietary things for adding event handlers is stupid. Not updating xmlhttprequest to work without needing to ask activex about it is stupid. Not being able to view visual markup languages with the XML parser is stupid. Not being able to incrementally load large flash movies if you use valid and sensible markup, is stupid. In some cases all they have to do is add an alias (or better, just change it to the correct way) but after a decade they still get it wrong, and of course it’s a shock that they have even implemented any of this aria stuff, given how technophobic they are in the IE team.

I’d bet the guy who implemented the aria value stuff correctly in ie8 standards mode got sacked, due to their obvious and consistently implemented policy of “let’s do everything in the most verbose, inconsistent and difficult possible way, and if someone else comes up with something better let’s make sure we DON’T fix ours, and instead publish a lot of tutorials on how to do it WRONG. This should hold back the advancement of the internet longer so our bosses survive just by selling Windows.”

You know this means we have two different kinds of browsers to work with, as always. Basically IE and not IE. You’re right, as usual we have to write a while extra alias function in userspace to abstract away the simplest and most primitive things in our code, and it’s – as always – because of Virus Explorer.

Internet Explorer, I hate you!! Why won’t you just die!?