Re: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

Hi,

> 1.01
>     Provide data in site titles (meta tabs) as to number of words 
> used and readability (flesch reading ease).

Is such data likely to be useful?  I for one have no idea what a certain 
number in the Flesch scale means.

We are going to have a problem with this one anyway though.  I can just 
imagine webmasters saying, "if we provide data on how easy our web pages 
are to read, people will think that they're aimed at those speaking 
English as a second language, and therefore not read them."

Maybe it would be better to put it in a new kind of tag (like the ALT 
tag does at present), and let the browser display it?  Eg.

<A HREF="mumble" WORDCOUNT=200 READING_LEVEL=5> ... </A>

That way, different browsers can decide how best to display it (and you 
can always hack out an HTML filter if you want to use any browser), and 
people who don't need the information don't get it.

If it's possible to crawl the whole site (as Mike Vorburger did with one 
of his ALTifier programs) then the word count / reading level 
information can probably be generated automatically.  (Not so with 
filters though because they only process the page you're looking at.)

>     turning off text labels (ALT) for non-readers.

I thought that ALT tags do not get displayed when images are turned on.  
However, I can add an option to my access gateway to remove ALT tags if 
that's what you really want.  (Or if there's anything else you can think 
of that a filter can do, within reason)

> z.z
>     Provide tabs for text in HTML

Can you elaborate?  I'm not sure what you mean.

Regards

-- Silas S Brown, St John's College Cambridge UK http://epona.ucam.org/~ssb22/

"Return your sword to its place, for all those who take the sword will
 perish by the sword" - Matthew 26:52

Received on Wednesday, 3 March 1999 15:04:18 UTC