Mozilla Funding HTML5 Accessibility Research (29th May 2008)
My grant proposal to research present-day HTML was accepted by Mozilla last week. Took 3 months of trying until I found somewhere who’d put their money where their mouth was.
The work is along very similar lines to Collections of Interesting Data Tables, which I did last year for free. Idea is to collect real pages from the web, figure out what authors are doing, then make this stuff work better. Where it’s too messed up to work better, help HTML5 make the right markup simpler and more obvious so authors can get it right more easily.
Ian Hickson was very receptive to this style of research last year. His description of what helped gives me a good idea of what to focus on this time around. Basically, same as last time but don’t bother about retrofitting simulations. He’s offered to provide lists of URLs and similar data.
Areas I’ll probably study include but are not limited to:
- Alt Text (
<img alt>,<input type="image" alt>, other?) - Breadcrumbs (
<p>,<ol>, other?) - Code Samples (
<pre>,<pre><code>,<p><code>, other?) - Code Samples with Syntax Highlighting (
<font color>,<span class>, other?) - Contact Details (
<address>,<p class>,<a href rel>, other?) - Dialogue (
<dl>,<cite>+<blockquote>,<p>, other?) - Forms and Labels (
<label for>,<input id>,<fieldset><legend>, other?) - Headings (
<h1>and friends,<font>,<p><strong>, other?) - Insertions and Deletions (
<ins>,<del>, other?) - Language Changes (
langon various elements, other?) - Link Relationships (
<link rel>,<a rel>, other?) - Link Text (repetition, context, other?)
- Lists (
<dl>,<ol>,<ul>,<li>,<p><br>, other?) - Paragraphs (
<p>,<br><br>,<div>, other?) - Phrase Elements (
<b>,<cite>,<u>,<var>, other?) - Punctuation (typographic marks, NCRs, UTF-8, other?)
- Questions and Answers (FAQs, blog memes, other?)
- Quoted Blocks (
<blockquote>,<div>,<ul>, other?) - Quoted Text (
<q>, punctuation only, other?) - Shortened Terms (
<abbr>,<acronym>, unmarked, other?) - Site Maps (
<h2><ul>,<div><img>,<table>, other?) - Tag Clouds (
<ul><li><a href rel="tag">, other?) - Time & Date (
<abbr class title>,<p class>, other?) - Title Attributes (supplementing link text, Microformats, other?)
The grant will cover about 500 hours of work. Completion date is 1st December 2008.