Re: Can User Agents adopt the lists that screen readers so eleqently do?

> > Actually, I wonder if User Agents could offer a list of links/headings
> > with the capability of setting the focus to a selected link/header in
the
>
> Some do.  However the typical commercial web page has no headings
> (and historically used headings as a font size control).

This is true, but not necessarily a problem. Let's look forward, not back.
More and more web designers are getting the idea of proper HTML structure
and I remain optimistic about the future for professional sites.

At the risk of going on a tangent, what worries me isn't just the vast
amount of legacy information that's tied up in tag soup out there, but also
the difficulty of helping home users to publish on the web in a manner that
works well from an accessibility standpoint. Some of the best content on the
web is published by individuals without any background in web accessibility
or web design; this was the point of the web after all. We need easy-to-use
publishing tools for the masses (no disrespect intended to the masses here
:) that do decent accessibility out of the box.

Has anyone thought of doing the same sort of thing for accessibility that
the Web Standards Project did for web design? Pressure needs to be brought
on Microsoft and other key vendors to pay more than lip service to web
accessibility in their publishing tools for business and home users as well
as web professionals.

Take care

Ian Anderson
zStudio

Received on Monday, 29 March 2004 16:16:36 UTC