- From: Daniel Dardailler <danield@w3.org>
- Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1998 12:22:39 +0200
- To: mike@vorburger.ch
- cc: w3c-wai-er-ig@w3.org
> 1) Separate/Alternative accessible version: I think realistically this is > the way the go, even though in theory it would be nicer to have just one > version, with different CSS etc It's not just "nicer" to have just one version, it's the only method that scales for the Web. > but the web and webmasters are just not at that point yet. Our job is to help them reach that point faster. You're giving up too soon :-) > -- I must admit that I don't really understand the > problem people seem to have with an alternative version: Provided that each > non-perfectly-accessible page contains <LINK title="Text-only version" > rel="alternate" href="text_only.html" media="aural, braille, tty"> to the > alternative accessible page, braille UAs and Lynx could just fetch that one > instead, transparently for the end-user! The issue is not the mechanism to find the alternate page, it's the duplication process involved, which leads to - more work for the author (which mean they are likely to drop this part) - likely divergence/out-of-date pages in the alternate site - more complex site management (mess of links from alternate pages going to graphical pages and the other way around) - each new media potentially needs a different alternate version Making a page accessibly also involve more work for the author, of course, but it doesn't carry the other problems and as a bonus, the end-user ends up controling the presentation. Text-only links are bad to the extent where they teach people that the only way to make their site accessible is by doubling their number of pages. But they are a viable solution for some people, so they are addressed in the PA guidelines. > 2) Interactive vs. automated/batch transforms: I strongly defend fully > automated tools for TRANSFORMATION, maybe less so for Evaluation. "General > public webmasters" don't want to spend time looking at details, but they > might be willing to provide an accessible site if it can be done > automatically by a tool, with a simple click. If it can be done automatically, why bother the author/webmaster, we just need to integrate the tool in the user agent or in some user proxy.
Received on Friday, 16 October 1998 06:23:00 UTC