RE: [webwatch] Visa Paralympics accessible site

aloha, al - in your list of Possible Techniques, you failed to include one 
of the most elegant illustrative engines, len kasday's WAVE [reference 1], 
the precise purpose of which is to provide, at no cost and precious little 
effort, a "pictures speak louder than synthesized speech" illustration not 
only of whether "accessibility" features have been included, but how they 
are either rendered  or are deficient or entirely lacking

WAVE is particularly useful, therefore, to illustrate both the consequences 
of using and/or neglecting to use "proper" markup as well as how that 
markup is expressed when the document source is rendered

it also serves as a cheap (read: free) self-voicing browser substitute - a 
lot of hay can be made by sitting a webmaster (or, better yet the person 
who signs his or her paychecks) down on the other (computer-free) side of 
the desk and then assigning them a series of relevant/pertinent tasks to 
complete via the agency of someone else running the computer exclusively 
from the keyboard - it drives the point home quite forcefully, and gives 
designers/implementors/managers a glimpse into the bottomless abyss of 
frustration also known as web-crawling...

oh, one more thing - why a screen-shot of HPR?  why not an AUDIO file - it 
is, after all, a self-voicing UA, as IBM reps have protested vociferously 
in UAWG meetings past, when HPR's visual display was invoked to illustrate 
a point, positively or negatively...  screen shots of a Lynx-view (strict 
linearizer) and WAVE (flow indicator) make much sense, but please, when it 
comes to aurally-oriented tools, we need AURAL and NOT visual 
representations of what the target "beneficiaries" experience...  we need 
to stop coddling authors/developers  and treating them with kid gloves and 
explanations of why such-and-such is bad - give them a true taste of the 
end result of their handiwork/typical practices, and see if they can 
swallow...

just my 2 cents (american), gregory.

References
1. Len Kasday's WAVE: http://www.temple.edu/inst_disabilities/piat/wave/

PS: i've offered to make such aural examples for the UA and GL WGs in the 
past, and have been promoting them since joining the WAI, but i need to 
collaborate with someone whose machine doesn't crash the instant 2 or more 
applications are open -- which is a decided handicap when you need to run 
an app just in order to interact with the machine in the first place...  i 
can't be the only person with access to a voice browser, and it has been my 
experience that most anyone else's machine runs better than mine, so 
consider this post-script a punt...

pps: this was composed sometime early in february, don't remember exactly 
when...  i'm still mostly offline, but periodically am able to download 
large globs of email, the processing of which is slow going...  apologies 
to all, especially the chair, for not communicating that i would be 
unavailable for the foreseeable future, but that's one of the problems with 
being unavailable...
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He that lives on Hope, dies farting
      -- Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack, 1763
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Gregory J. Rosmaita <unagi69@concentric.net>
    WebMaster and Minister of Propaganda, VICUG NYC
         <http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus/vicug/index.html>
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Received on Saturday, 9 March 2002 16:51:08 UTC