Re: "In terms of predictable layout and control, Flash is still lightyears beyond HTML+JS...That said, Flash was/is an accessibility nightmare."
The key question is if these are mutually exclusive goals or not. Can we take the simplicity of Flash's concepts and improve the accessibility, or will fixing accessibility inherently ruin the simplicity?
It seems to me that accessibility meta data can be supplied to the client independent of layout info. If Paragraph A comes after Paragraph B, the meta data can indicate that regardless of where A and B show up on the screen. Ideally they don't contradict, but my point is that they can be independent.
Conceptually think of two different markup tag sets. Set A is for visual positioning only, and Set B is for semantics (accessibility). The visual rendering engine would ignore tag Set B and an accessibility "reading machine" would ignore Set A. For practical/convenience reasons we may want to tie them together at times, but it's not a requirement for making both the visual screen "happy" and making ADA devices "happy" at the same time.
The key question is if these are mutually exclusive goals or not. Can we take the simplicity of Flash's concepts and improve the accessibility, or will fixing accessibility inherently ruin the simplicity?
It seems to me that accessibility meta data can be supplied to the client independent of layout info. If Paragraph A comes after Paragraph B, the meta data can indicate that regardless of where A and B show up on the screen. Ideally they don't contradict, but my point is that they can be independent.
Conceptually think of two different markup tag sets. Set A is for visual positioning only, and Set B is for semantics (accessibility). The visual rendering engine would ignore tag Set B and an accessibility "reading machine" would ignore Set A. For practical/convenience reasons we may want to tie them together at times, but it's not a requirement for making both the visual screen "happy" and making ADA devices "happy" at the same time.
They can be independent info.