Re: No Priority

I disagree a little bit. There is no particular reason why Lynx, and not a 
speech-based system such as w3+emacspeak, or pwWebSpeak, or Jaws, should 
be the bottom line. The bottom line is Universal access, and there are 
things which Lynx deals with well but which cause accesibiliy problems for 
other browsers. The readable non-link characters as seprators is a case 
in point. They may only be a p2 in themselves, but the principle that we 
should support older browsers is linked to our support for groups whose 
access is restricteed by technological, including socio-economic, 
difficulties. Certainly rural Australian communities are in that 
situation regardless of their personal physical (dis)abilities. They can 
have the best machines and latest software there is, but on a phone line 
that is struggling to keep a 9600 baud connection going for ten minutes 
it is a big help to be able to use the trimmed-down minimal features of a 
page for basic access. These are as interpreted by Explorer, or Netscape, 
rather than Lynx. A website which is accessible to legacy browsers is 
accessible to newer ones (So long as the process has been to design using 
technologies which degrade for legacy systems, rather than taking 
advantage of particular quirks in legacy browsers)

It is clear what this concerns, but it is not very clear who it concerns 
- frames also only concer some brosers out there, yet we require (with 
good reason) that they are written for accessibility to cater for all the 
browsers which don't. That's covered (apart from in the specifics) by 
guideline A.13 which may be constraiing in its priciples, but which in 
practice sums up a fair number of the guidelines which we regard as P1. 
It is also a good design principle to ensure universal accessibility.

Charles McCathieNevile

On Mon, 23 Nov 1998, Daniel Dardailler wrote:
>   Use interim accessibility solutions so that assistive
>   technologies and older browsers will operate correctly.
> 
> This is too constraining and only concern legacy user-agents.
> 
> Lynx is my bottom-line criteria: if Lynx supports it, then it's OK to
> author it. So default place-holder, vertical bar between link, etc,
> are not necessary in my opinion.
> 
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Received on Monday, 23 November 1998 09:10:39 UTC