Re: article

my bad, I got there OK.

You write good. A typo "depreciate" should be "deprecate".

One quibble. Advising those who would use ants and balloons to provide an
alternative site is giving up too easily. The urge to follow "Universal
Design" principles trumps the ease of a "Separate but Equal" Web site. The
"ease" is only for the author and it almost inevitably leads to the separate
(usually referred to as a "text-only" site) page being separately maintained
hence often out-of-sync with the "real" page.

LS:: "You can state the topic of the paragraph within a tag at the beginning
of the  sentence."

WL: I think the idea of a pseudo-element is a great idea for helping to
enable "skimming". It could be a class that had no stylistic
(presentational) effect yet for the properly designed UA readily enable
"topic sentence indexing". In fact one could use <accesskey> or <tabindex>
to do this.

LS:: "Everyone with a disability will benefit from a clear  well-structured
document, easy short words (no slang or jargon),  and simple sentences."

WL: IMO you sell short the list of those who would benefit. Those benefitted
include essentially everybody - not least the author!

(Oh, the navigation links at the bottom of the "structured" page need work.)

LS:: "Information presented visually is not useful when you cannot  see."

WL: We like to include the "electronic curb-cut" benefit that there are
"eyes-free" situations (driving, WebPhones, etc.) where although one can
see, one has chosen to use that ability for something else at the time.

LS:: " For a gimmicky cute site you need a separate text-only version."

WL: Again WITH FEELING: don't give up so easily in this matter. If one
attends to the guidelines there is not a *need* for a separate version. Such
a thing should only be undertaken under the most stringent conditions - when
it is impossible to use a single presentation to satisfy all users.
Universal Design is important and we are working very hard on *Device
Independent Authoring* so that there aren't parallel Webs, often with
conflicting messages.

LS:: "Therefore,  tables for layout purposes are best avoided"

WL: I'm not sure this is great advice. Tables are in fact *always* for
layout purposes - data tables are just a visually useful means of presenting
the underlying data. When the data are sort of "unrelated" the guidelines
advise how to use various attributes to make this clear. Rather than
avoidance, I think you might stress compliance.

(the #problems link doesn't work, probably because it attempts to jump to a
different page)

LS:: "Use  of color to help clarify structure, but not exclusively..."

WL: If you come up with a good way to reveal the semantics of color used in
this way (a class in CSS, I presume) it would be helpful. Your "Class names
that reflect the content and not the presentation." is the right direction,
just not sure how well implemented the availability of these names is at
this time.

I didn't get into "XML and the future" because I'm barely keeping up with
the present. I am also trying to keep us focused on XHTML since IMO there is
so much momentum (inertia?) in place for HTML that we must continue to
attend to its steady improvement. XML will not make HTML go away.

I think your piece is outstanding in its clarity and with a few more bows in
the direction of Universal Design could very well serve as a pointed-to
supplement for the guidelines.

--
Love.
           ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE

Received on Thursday, 7 September 2000 10:16:20 UTC