Maps for HTML

[shawnthompson]

Moved from: canada-ca/a11y#32

I would like to be able to contribute our work on Maps for HTML to this toolkit.

"Maps for HTML" is the name of a W3C Community Group which aims to extend HTML to include Web maps. We have a gh organization where we do our work, and which has contributors from around the world. We want browsers to natively incorporate maps and features, through the HTML language.

We have a specific, if not quite finished, proposal for how to include maps in HTML, which is the "MapML Proposal".

The draft specification for MapML ("Map Markup Language"), is available here. MapML is intended to be an extended subset of HTML, as well as a new media type ("text/mapml").

The evolving "polyfill" for MapML is available here, with example pages with the running polyfill over here. We have engaged with the a11y community to ensure that we stay on a path towards appropriately specifying, implementing and standardizing maps so that they can be more useful to people with disabilities, but I recognize that this will be a bit of a process.

There is also an index of various resources available here.

We held a global workshop in September 2020, and many of the presentations and panels were based on what accessibility means for maps, and how it could be improved. I admit that our polyfill may not be fully accessible at this time, but I would appreciate any and all input on that subject. My goal in posting here is to get the specifications and polyfill up to a level that they can and should be included in your Digital Accessibility Toolkit.

cc/ @prushforth