RE: Fw: Disturbing trend in tables

Charles,

	Very good arguments, and the very ones I've heard over and over.  I've
been referred to the Neilson site, to read over and over his disclaimer for
not having illustrations because he doesn't know how and doesn't feel it
important to learn or get help to do it. And he's saying so on a public
site that is much-ballyhooed as an important source of reasons to do
accessibility "right".... 

	Unless someone can state that a certain group or groups of disabled folks
are unable to use pages created in Front Page, I will continue to use the
tool and recommend it to newbies. Who says you need an add-on to put alt
text? You don't .... you right-click on the image, click on properties, and
type in your alt text. 

	Unless I've missed something, there is no other html authoring tool that
is easy to use (for newbies, wysiwyg, of course), that we don't have to
spend any money to acquire, and that can be learned in a short time.  Short
of telling teachers they can't do their own web pages, which is exactly the
opposite of what I need to tell them, I  don't see a better solution. Do you? 

					Anne  

	

At 07:41 PM 1/17/01 -0800, Charles F. Munat wrote:
>
>On Wednesday, January 17, 2001 2:47 PM, Anne Pemberton wrote:
>
>"It's not too long ago
>that we all learned to use B, I and U ... now you want to change those easy
>to remember commands with different commands. That's fine, but it isn't
>really an 'accessibility' issue so much as a preference of some folks. Your
>preference vs 'my' preference..."
>
>Reply:
>
>No, it *is* an accessibility issue. The B element tells me nothing other
>than that you wanted the text a little darker. Did you intend to emphasize
>it, or do you just like that style? If it is emphasis you wanted, EM or
>STRONG should be used. These are rendered as "with emphasis" or "with strong
>emphasis" in some contexts, whereas B might not be. If it's emphasis you
>want, get it right. If all you want is a look, use CSS.
>
>Bruce:
>>how can you
>>recommend Front Page to people who know LESS than you about HTML and
>>disabilities?
>
>Anne:
>"Because it's the best tool currently available to us. Front Page is
>included in the Office 2000 that we have on all the county PC's... "
>
>Reply:
>
>What is the difference between saying that the county uses FrontPage because
>it can't be troubled to find a better option (like actually training people
>to use HTML and CSS) and saying that web site owners can't be troubled to
>worry about making pages accessible to people with cognitive disabilities?
>Much of your post (and indeed your approach in general) seems to say that it
>is too much trouble to learn how to build web sites using valid HTML (note:
>valid has a technical meaning here that is specifically defined with regard
>to HTML). Why shouldn't anyone use that same argument to say that it's too
>much trouble to add the images necessary to help PWDs?
>
>It takes only a few hours to learn the basics of HTML. A few more to learn
>some simple CSS. You can build any web page you want to in Notepad without
>much trouble at all. There are people on this list with no formal computer
>training who do exactly that quite successfully. There are free HTML Editors
>that do a pretty good job. Any of these would be better options than to use
>a tool that not only fails to generate valid code (and needs plugins to be
>able to add alt text to images), but also - like all WYSIWYG environments -
>keeps the user ignorant of what is really going on.
>
>Microsoft doesn't give a damn about valid code. Microsoft cares about profit
>and market share, and their philosophy can be summed up simply: add
>proprietary "enhancements" to lock people in to using their products. That
>you use FrontPage (and think it's "best") because it comes with Word just
>shows that they're right... so far.
>
>FrontPage should have been (and could have been) producing 100% valid HTML
>long ago. That this topic continues to come up on this list just goes to
>show that Microsoft really can't be bothered (or, more accurately, that they
>consider valid code as a *drawback* not a benefit, since it doesn't lock
>users in to their software).
>
>Anne:
>"We
>may differ on our interpretation of VALID html. To me, VALID html is the
>code that's in the html book from the book store. When I (rarely) read the
>code that's produced by a Front Page page, it looks valid enough to me ...
>and it works when I hang it on the web ... You have a different
>understanding of what VALID html is,"
>
>Reply:
>
>If we're going to start redefining words, why not redefine accessibility to
>mean "accessible to my friends and me"? Valid HTML is HTML that validates to
>a given HTML specification, a good reason to include the doctype
>declaration. If you use valid in some other way, you simply won't be
>understood. Slippery definitions don't do anything to help communication;
>neither does sloppy use. The same can be said for HTML.
>
>
>Charles F. Munat,
>Seattle, Washington
>
>
>
>

Received on Thursday, 18 January 2001 07:02:43 UTC