FW: practical info for creating accessible web pages

Thought you might find this critique interesting...

Denis

-----Original Message-----
From: * WEB http://www.rit.edu/~easi
[mailto:EASI@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU]On Behalf Of Paul Chapin
Sent: Friday, May 05, 2000 8:47 AM
To: EASI@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU
Subject: Re: practical info for creating accessible web pages


> We often refer folks to the following site:

> Chisholm, W., Vanderheiden, G., & Jacobs, I. (1999). Web content
> accessibility guidelines 1.0 - W3C recommendation 5-May-1999.
> http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/wai-pageauth.html

I'm sorry, but I find the stuff from www.w3.org to be pretty useless.  It's
long winded, confusingly organized (it's hypertext taken to an extreme), and
full of recommendations that are either not essential (use cascading
spreedsheet instead of blockquote to indent) or pointless (use longdesc tag
dispite the fact that none of the current common browsers support longdesc).
If I pointed my users to those pages, they would take one look at them,
decide either I was out of my mind or that making pages accessible would be
a massive undertaking, and abandon any attempt at accessibility.

The guidelines were clearly written by programmers and html geeks who were
much more interested in conceptual purity than getting the job done.

Paul Chapin
Curricular Computing Specialist
Amherst College
http://www.amherst.edu/~pdchapin

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Received on Friday, 5 May 2000 09:03:19 UTC