- From: Murray Maloney <murray@muzmo.com>
- Date: Thu, 05 Feb 2009 10:35:30 -0500
- To: "Philip TAYLOR (Ret'd)" <P.Taylor@Rhul.Ac.Uk>
- Cc: Sam Ruby <rubys@intertwingly.net>,Rob Sayre <rsayre@mozilla.com>, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>,Larry Masinter <masinter@adobe.com>, HTML WG <public-html@w3.org>
At 01:19 PM 2/5/2009 +0000, Philip TAYLOR (Ret'd) wrote: >I think there is always a place for "humble tags that do only one thing", >and I would suspect that the vast majority of markup consists primarily >of such tags. But when speaking of tags such as <font>, it is important >(IMHO) to appreciate that not only do they do only one thing, they do >that thing only for one target audience : those who have normal visual >abilities, and who therefore view web content visually. But what of >those who do not have such abilities : the blind, and partially sighted ? >Of what use to them is a stretch of text surrounded by <font> tags ? >One thing on which I though we were all agreed is that the web must, >first and foremost, be accessible (to all), and that the use of >purely visual styling treats those lacking normal visual abilities >as second-class citizens. Frankly, your example makes us all second-class citizens, and does not harm the visually-impaired any more than the sighted. That is, knowledge that a span of text is in a different color than the rest of the text only tells me that that text is in a different color. Unless there is a key, I don't know anything more about that colored text than the next guy -- sighted or not. No discrimination. No harm, no foul.
Received on Thursday, 5 February 2009 15:57:14 UTC