Re: Some questions from CHI-WEB people

I hear a lot of complaining here.  I hear the same complaints that I
hear when we discuss usability and the web.  Take the case of tables
versus css.  which will degrade more gracefully in older browsers?  The
biggest hurdles to accessibility from a mechanical stand point have been
the point and click tools that have been sold for huge amounts of money
so that sites can go up that only look good but do not validate, are not
uniform in their structure and are generally a mess to maintain.  There
is no argument that I know of against the use of multiple versions of a
page when a fallback is required but the starting point should be the
accessible/usable site.  If fancy stuff goes ontop of that in another
channel, fine.  If special delivery mechanisms are employed aimed at
special targets, fine.  What we seem to be discussing here though is
much more than accessibility so it's too bad that it is hard.  many
things are hard.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Scott Luebking" <phoenixl@sonic.net>
To: <lucy-ples@mtu-net.ru>; <phoenixl@sonic.net>; <poehlman1@home.com>;
<w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Sent: Monday, December 24, 2001 1:08 PM
Subject: Re: Some questions from CHI-WEB people


Hi,

The learning and understanding of the guidelines is still fairly steep.
For example, what does linearization mean and how does a web page
developer learn how something will be linearized?  How much time is
needed to learn the difference between theoretical CSS and what the
results actually look like for the various browsers?

Implementation of the guidelines often means spending time resolving
conflicts betweens access and other requirements for the web page.  For
example, having an image map followed by a list of the links referred to
in the image map often results in a visual presentation which can be not
as appealing.  Resolving conflicts can just take up a lot of time.

One of the benfits of a mutiple version approach is that it can reduce
the number of conflicts that need to be resolved when one version is
used.
In general, it is much faster to use tables for visual layout than
to use CSS.  If one version of the web page presents the information
in a very beautiful layout and another version of the web page presents
the information in a more linear format, some of the conflicts are
avoided
and there can be a possible increase in efficiency.

Scott

> but if we've gotten past all the learning, how much extra effort is
> required if all the players are on the same team in that the goal is
> accessible and attractive?

Received on Monday, 24 December 2001 13:21:45 UTC