Re: About WAI Accessibility Guidelines

Following Daniel's extensive comments...

I agree that validating HTML/CSS is important, but ensuring it is valid 
can be done manually or by a validator. If the technique said:

Check source code against the HTML 4.0 Spec [href] or use an automatic 
validator such as ...

then I think it should be P1, since having valid code is P1.

Bobby is not a P1 - one of the reasons is that it is not always correct. 
Manual checking is potentially better. Again, maybe that should be in the 
techniques somewhere.

Column layout is a P1 problem. it ought to be UA, but the problem has 
been created already. It may (in the future) go away. But at present it 
is crucial for a relatively small group of people, and the likelihood 
that they will all get good software and machines which run it in the 
next six months may not be that high. The problem is the same as D-link 
vs LONGDESC - it ought to be a UA problem, but the legacy (for all users) 
of history means that it can only presently be solved by the author 
(using a D-link). I still think that table layout of columns is P1. 
Unfortunately, there is a wider problem. TABLE is there because we use a 
lot of tabular information (think of spreadsheets). It is possible to use 
an alternative format (linearise the table) and the algorithms are not 
even terribly complex in most cases (especially where the table has a 
structure, rather than being arbitrarily constructed for layout reasons). 
But they are not well-implemented (I understand there is an 
implementation for the w3 browser in emacs, but when I was playing with 
Jason White looking at websites he didn't have the table package, and as 
a consequence tables were a problem. (Jason, what do you think about this 
one?)

Charles McCN

Received on Sunday, 6 September 1998 06:56:52 UTC