Re: AWARE Center Common Myths About Web Accessibility

At 01:14 PM 5/8/1999 -0500, pfhyper wrote:
>I think the AWARE Myths page is very good.  I do have a comment on Myth 
>#3: "Web accessibility is too difficult for the average web designer."

>I'm not sure this is a myth. I guess it depends on how you define 
>"average." 

In my opinion -- and note that my opinion is not one necessarily
shared by everyone else -- the keys to accessible web authoring
ARE very simple.  It's _not_ rocket science, and it's fairly 
easy to teach people how to do it right.  (Especially with great
tools like Bobby and lots of wonderful references out there.)

I've even written a document (which I'll be posting soon) that
tells how to make accessible web documents [to WCAG 1.0 Single-A
compliance] using Netscape Composer -- and for the most part it's
stuff that can be handled by a short cheat-sheet that "naive
authors" can keep beside them while using Composer.

So, while there may be some very complex things out there --
such as HTML 4.0 table attributes, which I admit that I have
never used on a "real" web site -- the fundamentals of accessible
web authoring are pretty darn simple.  If you can learn web
design at all, you can learn this easily.

(Maybe I need to add more of the above to the myth text.)

Peter, thanks for the feedback and for your admirable approach
to web accessibility!

--
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@hwg.org>
President, Governing Board Member
HTML Writers Guild <URL:http://www.hwg.org>
Director, Accessible Web Authoring Resources and Education Center
  <URL:http://aware.hwg.org/>

Received on Saturday, 8 May 1999 14:30:55 UTC