Using progressive enhancement will improve your SEO and help your development process by allowing you to build and test your interaction seperately to your content/presentation. You’ll get more benefit from this if you do it from the start.

Are you talking about the Canvas part where text are not rendered as text?

If that’s the case, another issue would be that the text are not cut-and-paste-ssable. So I guess this is a very “main stream” accessibility issue.

In any case, Bespin’s a good experiment.

You make a good point, and I certainly wouldn’t vilify or make snide comments about a beta product that isn’t 100% in terms of accessibility.

However, ‘keeping it in mind’ is a little vague, and I can see people looking at a spec and saying, ‘well, we thought about it’.
Later down the line, because they weren’t aware of the implications, it’s too late to reverse or alter some of the fundamental decisions.

The mind it’s kept in is fairly important in that early stage, one with experience in accessibility will see things differently…

This article is again an exemplary one; thank you for making it accessible to us – so we could stea.. sorry, spread the word.

bests,
kunter

I think that at the point where something goes from being an experiment to the point of it becoming a real product that’s where accessibility does need to be a deliverable. Bespin isn’t at that point, its nothing more than a proof-of-concept of using canvas as the basis of an application.

When Bespin becomes a service, people use it as an editor for writing code, rather than just seeing how cool it is, then accessibility should be a requirement.

The work required to get from an experiment to a real product is probably going to be too much for a number of projects, but that’s the point. If it isn’t feasible for it to be a real product because, for example, it can’t be accessible to the audience it is aimed at, then it’s perhaps the right decision for it to be nothing more than experimental. Maybe someone with better skill and insight can take that experiment themselves and use that as a demonstration for building it accessibly.

So I agree, experimenters need room to experiment and innovate. But real products need to be accessible.

What we don’t want to encourage is the continuing accessibility failure of Flex and AIR. That is just irresponsible, and I am hoping the Bespin guys won’t be making the same mistake when it comes to turning their concept into a real product or service.

If innovators have to wait till their product is accessible, it simply means they release two/six/eighteen months later. That’s more months they have to wait to figure out their product sucks or rocks.

Definitely you shouldn’t release a *final* version of a product that’s inaccessible, but you have to draw the line somewhere and say “this is what we’re throwing out into the world. Is it useful? How are you going to use it?”.

The danger you have to watch out for is using “innovation” as an excuse to not use best practices.