

Re: not jaws, just inaccessible:Fw: Inaccessible Web sites

From: David Poehlman <poehlman1@comcast.net>
Date: Fri, 24 May 2002 18:01:34 -0400
To: John Foliot - bytown internet <foliot@bytowninternet.com>, Aaron Smith <aaron@gwmicro.com>, W3c-Wai-Ig <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Message-id: <003101c2036e$92620b20$91e03244@DAVIDPOEHLMAN>
all quite true.

----- Original Message -----
From: "John Foliot - bytown internet" <foliot@bytowninternet.com>
To: "Aaron Smith" <aaron@gwmicro.com>; "W3c-Wai-Ig" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Sent: Friday, May 24, 2002 5:54 PM
Subject: RE: not jaws, just inaccessible:Fw: Inaccessible Web sites

Accessible to *you* perhaps, but accessible to all?  If you define
accessibility as web pages that render coherently to screen readers,
perhaps this page will do.  But what about non-standard user-agents?

Recently, I took a 2 hour road trip with an associate, who brought along
new RIM Blackberry.  While driving down a semi-remote stretch of highway
(Ottawa to Montreal) he was checking his emails and wirelessly surfing
web.  The HTML page contents were being dynamically re-written to WML to
output to the 'berry.  Pages that validated delivered the content
correctly... pages that did not, well... garbage in, garbage out. (Pages
that validated to XHTML were awesome!)

To me, accessibility is not JUST the disabled community, although they
surely benefit the most.  But accessibility means the *message* gets
logically and completely, regardles of how you get it.  Acura is
shipping a new car this fall with a web browser embedded into the dash
great"), LG Digital is running TV ads with Internet Ready
With these thinner clients coming along, if the content doesn't work in
them, then it's inaccessible.  Software which is written to deal with
kludges and hacks is larger, more prone to buggyness, and usually takes
longer to develop, which of course means it costs more (Internet
aside).  In contrast, valid HTML only requires that the rendering agent
properly interpret the "rules" as specified in the DTD.  As the web
we _will_ move beyond HTML 4.01 into more XML styled development...
already moving in that direction today.  With this move, stricter
interpretations and renderings will be absolutely required.

Finally, it was particualrly bothersome that it was a web site which
proported to represent International Webmasters - how ironic.


> But yet the page content is still accessible. I agree with a
> previous post
> regarding the terminology needing to be switched from "inaccessible"
> "does not validate." After all, a page's ability to validate or lack
> thereof does not necessarily dictate its accessibility
> (fortunately/unfortunately as that may be).
> At 04:29 PM 5/24/2002 -0400, John Foliot - bytown internet wrote:
> >Well, for one, it doesn't even validate!
Received on Friday, 24 May 2002 18:02:06 UTC
