Re: Promoting standards - to Al Abut

Thanks for the kind words John, and yes, it's very nice to be in the same 
boat with other self-appointed evangelists toiling away in large 
organizations. Designers, programmers and web developers in general have 
their circles to talk about issues, but finding people interested in web 
standards has been another matter.

As for one of your points:

At 10:18 PM 7/10/2002 +0100, John Colby wrote:
>It may not be fair using someone else's disability to highlight that we 
>should be doing something different, but do say that disability of 
>whatever form is something that occurs more as people get older, and would 
>you (the audience) like it if you were excluded from something you can do now?

I do feel sometimes like I'm co-opting the cause of designing with disabled 
people in mind simply because pages that are accessible for them are 
consequently easily digestible by other devices as well. There's a few 
Pocket PC initiatives starting on campus that are experimenting with 
changing the way some undergraduate courses are taught, with IPaqs on each 
desk, and having the course material be already standards-compliant for 
visually impaired professors helps immensely, since it's trivial to recycle 
that content. In fact, the only web developers on my campus that have been 
able to implement any kind of usability or accessibility-related designs 
were in departments where they had disabled faculty. I never pictured 
myself saying this and I'd wouldn't wish ill upon anyone, but I found 
myself wishing that our department had more handicapped professors!

Received on Thursday, 11 July 2002 12:47:41 UTC