Re: Personalized web pages

aloha, scott!

i, too, have been investigating online banking myself recently, and the
problems aren't presentational -- they are structural -- including (but not
limited to) the misuse of structural elements to achieve presentational
effects; the failure to provide textual equivalents for multimedia objects (in
particular, failure to provide ALT text for graphically defined links, or for
the AREAs defined for image maps); the use of style to convey meaning (i.e.
changes in font color on forms to indicate required fields); etc.

therefore, i think you mis-characterize the issue when you write:

quote
One of the questions was how to make it easy to use by blind people.
I basically said that there are different views of the issues. Some
blind people want to use the same web pages as sighted people even if they
are harder to use.  Other blind people prefer that web pages
be easy to use.  (As one blind user quipped "I'm willing to show the
world one day a month that I can use the same web pages as sighted
if I can have the rest of the month to take the easy route".  )
unquote

the issue isn't as simple as you portrayed it -- the goal (my goal at least) is
to have page authors concerned first and foremost with structure and content,
so as to achieve a universally accessible and interoperable underlying
structure for the document with which individual users can then interact
according to their own preferences, as expressed either by the author's
stylesheet or by a custom (local) stylesheet...

it's not a question of wanting quote to use the same web pages as sighted
people even if they are harder to use unquote, but, rather, of ensuring that
the structure and content is uniform and completely expressed, no matter the
modality of whatever style is overlaid the structure and content...

the point is -- give me equal access to all of the content you wish to provide
a generic visitor, in a consistent and well structured format, and leave the
stylistic presentation to stylesheets, period

gregory
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He that lives on Hope, dies farting
     -- Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack, 1763
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Gregory J. Rosmaita <unagi69@concentric.net>
   WebMaster and Minister of Propaganda, VICUG NYC
        <http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus/vicug/index.html>
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Received on Wednesday, 15 December 1999 18:43:24 UTC