Alternative Web sites

Hi group,

Yesterday I've read about Tesco prize on web accessibility
http://www.out-law.com/php/page.php?page_id=tescocomshamesriv1087899763&area
=news.

In the article, I read "computers and disability charity AbilityNet praised
Tesco for its alternative web site www.tesco.com/access which it found to be
the only site to meet the basic web accessibility needs of disabled users in
a survey of the UK's five most prominent supermarkets."

The web is full of "wai sites" and alternative web sites, and many of them
are text only web sites. 

But, what about WCAG? In the article above there's not one single word about
W3C and the Web standards, and I'm sure all those kind of sites cannot be
considered WCAG compliant; the checkpoint 11.4 refers to a single
alternative page, not to an entire alternative site. 

Moreover the creation of an alternative web site is, in my opinion, a good
and hateful way to discriminate PWD, and to highlight the difference between
a "normal" user and a "not normal" one.

Also in Italy there are a lot of important examples of alternative web sites
that are smuggled as fully WAI compliant, against the evidence; some of them
are even well done and I find them much more usable (and of course
accessibile) than the "principal" site, but WCAG 1.0 (and 2.0 too) don't
drive  developers to have such an approach, and push them to the opposite
side: one unique usable and accessibile Web site for all Web users.

Comments about it?

My best regards,


Roberto Castaldo
-----------------------------------
www.Webaccessibile.Org coordinator
IWA/HWG Member
rcastaldo@webaccessibile.org
r.castaldo@iol.it
Mobile 348 3700161
Icq 178709294
-----------------------------------

Received on Thursday, 24 June 2004 05:25:18 UTC