Some comments on the Web Contents Accessibility Guidelines (26 Feb 99 draft)

Some comments on the Web Contents Accessibility Guidelines (26 Feb 99
draft).

In the introduction you state "...accessibility design does not generally
mean extra work ...".  I think this is misleading.  It may not mean much
extra work if you are creating HTML documents from scratch.  However if you
are converting large numbers of legacy documents it can be (prompts to add
ALT tags can't be done in batch mode).  Also work has to be done to use
"safe" CSS features - otherwise pages may be unprintable in certain versions
of Netscape.  Unfortunately I think the accessibility guidelines have to
take into account bugs in widely deployed browsers.

Guidelines one gives the example "a logo in a link might be "Return to home
page"."  The "Return to Home Page" is a bad name for an anchor, as the user
might not have visited the home page.  I'd suggest "Go to home page".

Checkpoint 1.1 and elsewhere gives HTML elements in capitals (e.g. IMG).  In
the light of the XHTML document, arguably these should be lowercase??

Brian Kelly
------------------------------------------------------
Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus
UKOLN, University of Bath, BATH, England, BA2 7AY
Email:  b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk     URL:    http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/
Homepage: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/b.kelly.html
Phone:  01225 323943            FAX:   01225 826838

Received on Thursday, 18 March 1999 06:31:51 UTC