AJAX and Accessibility
At the recent friday cabal, while discussing AJAX and extensibility, I was struck by one of the more interesting implications of the rapid adoption of AJAX toolkits. Currently, everyone is building toolkits to help them buid richer client-side logic in DHTML and JavaScript and to communicate with HTTP web services. These toolkits will save developers lots of time, but they will also encourage developers to support more dynamic functionality than the accessibility community is accustomed to dealing with. If you look at some of the better examples of AJAX applications out there today, they get low marks for accessibility.
On one hand, this is an opportunity, because it means that the toolkit providers can bake accessibility hooks into their frameworks and pass the benefits on to developers. But it also means that there will be a proliferation of apps which use newer, non-accessible UI functionality enabled by other toolkits. So in the short term, and until there is some degree of consolidation, there will be a negative impact to accessibility on the web. And the accessiblity community will need to target improvements in the toolkits with broadest scope (whether large vendors, or large open source following).
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To the person who cursed creatively at me for using terms like AJAX and POX, I did not delete your comment purposely. My server has been unreliable, and I am in the process of moving off of shared hosting. This has been the longest I have ever gone without blogging, due to work commitments (I hope my boss is reading), so it is taking some time.