ageism, disability & Agenda, 6 April, 2001

Accessibility is about a business model and also, a model that every
individual understands.

I should like to mention a personal case, and two points.
My father is ~66 and bought himself a laptop over a year ago. He uses
compuserve to email daily and recieves and sends dozens of messages a day.
He has no disability that I am  aware of, recently wrote a very lengthy book
on Afghanistan, and has been a very succesful business manager.

He had never been on the web, despite seeing a standard browser interface on
a daily basis.
He just does not 'get' the interface, he never discovered the 'return'
button, for instance. Admittedly cs has a very busy homepage, but worse than
that, he believes there is nothing of value to find on the web.

I did find him a number of sites of interest, via google and reset his
homepage.

Our local family church http://www.stmaryschurch-ingestre.co.uk/ is of
interest to him.
it needs ~£600,000.00 spent in restoration. However the site fails to
provide contact details.
A rather fundamental error. It also has a high proportion of 404s.

I would at the risk of upsetting some members ask everyone to consider how
we are to create a site that:
appeals to everyone, and educates individual authors in the means suitable
for creating accessible websites, according to their means.

If we cannot do this, we cannot expect others to follow what we say.

thanks Kevin a great piece of work.

jonathan chetwynd
IT teacher (LD)
j.chetwynd@btinternet.com
http://www.signbrowser.org.uk

Received on Friday, 6 April 2001 03:28:59 UTC