RE: Unicode and accessibility

Jesper et al,

I've taken one piece from your original message and replaced some key
phrases with X to illustrate:

Maybe it is more realistic in many situations to leave X to user agents than
to expect web page authors to do the job. Web page authors should probably
still X in web content made by themselves, but it is probably much more
convenient and realistic to leave this task to user agents for many types of
generated content. Why not leave the job of X to a handful of user agents
and save millions of web page authors for a lot of work?

That's where this argument falls down for me. Should we create user agents
that recognize that someone has used <font size="6"> </font> and
automatically convert them to a proper heading? I don't think so, and I
certainly think they same holds true for language. Ultimately for
accessibility to "work" we all have a part to play. Yes, we need smarter
user agents. Yes, we need smarter authoring tools. But we also need smarter
authors that do their job by doing the right thing. Sure we could write user
agents that make guesses on language switches, but why would we want to rely
on "guessing", when we can just as easily tell the user agent precisely
which language to use?

It just doesn't make sense to me...

Best regards,
Derek.
--
Derek Featherstone  feather@wats.ca
Web Accessibility Specialist / Co-founder of WATS.ca
http://www.wats.ca
Tel: 613.599.9784  Toll-free: 1.866.932.4878 (North America)

Received on Monday, 5 April 2004 12:23:04 UTC