Re: Dynamic Websites

Ryan Jean wrote:
>
> In my opinion, blog sites are most web accessible in the dynamic world
>
> However, chat and video hosting sites are the worst.
>
These are generalisations, and not useful ones. There are some high 
profile video and social networking sites which have put a lot of effort 
into having lots of features (which attract users), and not a lot of 
effort into making those features accessible (that said, it isn't all 
doom and gloom: http://de.youtube.com/blog?entry=mi8D3ntPgFQ ).

Blogs on the other hand, have tended towards being simple and not 
covered in widgets, so tend to be relatively accessible (just because 
there isn't much room to go wrong in).

JavaScript is not a barrier to accessibility. Flash is not a barrier to 
accessibility (so long as the user is on Windows, since Flash doesn't, 
AFAIK, have as good accessibility features on other platforms).

Badly written JS and Flash are a different story, but claims like "these 
sites utilize JavaScript and Flash a lot, which tries to avoid the 
keyboard" are just plain wrong.

Frankly, I don't see much point in starting email threads dedicated to 
booing YouTube, Facebook and similar sites for being inaccessible.

(1) This is w3c-wai-ig - you're shouting into an echo chamber.

(2) Shouting "Bad! Bad!" without proposing (or even asking for) 
solutions isn't constructive.

It would be nicer to see people producing (and publishing outside the 
echo chamber) *solutions* to the problems (such as Christian Heilmann 
does - for example http://icant.co.uk/easy-youtube/docs/index.html and 
http://icant.co.uk/articles/seven-rules-of-unobtrusive-javascript/ )


-- 
David Dorward
http://dorward.me.uk/

Received on Thursday, 11 December 2008 15:56:12 UTC