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Accessibility evaluation tools built into debugging tools like Firebug need to have run time (calculated) information about the foreground and background colors of rendered text content and the information about other rendering information related to CSS display and visibility properties. This information is critical for the evaluation of color contrast requirements of WCAG 2.0 and for determining if structural information like headers is visible to assistive technologies like screen readers.
What makes this an HTML spec issue?
This is a CSS issue, not an HTML issue. Specifically, it's an issue for the CSS Object Model, which defines the javascript interface with CSS. Asking an element for its foreground and background colors is trivial by using the getComputedStyle() function and asking it for 'color' and 'background-color'.
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document: http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html Status: Rejected Change Description: no spec change Rationale: Closing based on comment 1 and comment 2. Please reopen if this is indeed an HTML spec issue, but if so please indicate more clearly what you would like changed exactly.
The bug-triage sub team agrees with comment 2, not making this a11yTF priority