- From: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 08:43:10 -0400 (EDT)
- To: "'Ian Jacobs'" <ij@w3.org>
- cc: "WAI (E-mail)" <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Some further thoughts about alternative text-only versions... + no good to people with comprehension problems. + Does not contain any other media (obviously). Some users find it easier to work primarily in a text mode but can make use of media elements. For example, many blind users have an audio player or three attached to their text-based browser, and people who have some vision (me for example) may occasionally open an image in a viewer. If the images are not there that's not possible. Charles Hello, Brain dump for archival purposes on some disadvantages and advantages of plain text, text-only pages, alternative text pages, rich multimedia content, and dynamic content. Your comments and additions welcome! 1) Plain text (i.e., no markup): Advantages: may be rendered by readily available assistive technologies in three modes: graphically, as speech, and as Braille. Disadvantages: 1) does not support structure, navigation, style, and other features that promote accessibility. 2) Unusable today by deaf non-readers 3) Probably useless to some users with cognitive disabilities. 2) Text-only pages (may include markup but no audio, video, etc.) Advantages beyond plain text: linking, navigation, styling, and other processing possible. Disadvantages beyond plain text: None? 3) Alternative text-only pages. Advantages: Combined with "primary" pages, may produce an accessible whole. Disadvantages: 1) Two pages are harder to manage than one. 2) The world is not binary; people can generally use various types of content with differing degrees of success. Pushing some content to an alternative text-only page creates an artificial dichotomy 3) You lose fine-grain relationships among content. If, instead of knowing that a particular piece of text is an "alt" to an IMG element, the only thing you know is that page B is a text-only alternative to page A, you build an information-poor Web. 4) Rich multimedia pages: Advantages: When accessible, provide information most users can use. Disadvantages even when authored accessibly: 1) May be slow to download (implementation issue, though real). 2) May be unusable to some users unless there is adequate control in user agents to suppress interfering background images, etc. 5) Dynamic pages: Advantages: Useful for conveying changes in information. Disadvantages: 1) May be unusable to some users unless there is adequate control in user agents to allow control of the rate of change. 2) May cause problems to some assistive technologies (implementation issue, though real) Other topics?? - Ian -- Ian Jacobs (jacobs@w3.org) http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs Tel: +1 831 457-2842 Cell: +1 917 450-8783 -- Charles McCathieNevile mailto:charles@w3.org phone: +61 (0) 409 134 136 W3C Web Accessibility Initiative http://www.w3.org/WAI Location: I-cubed, 110 Victoria Street, Carlton VIC 3053, Australia September - November 2000: W3C INRIA, 2004 Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France
Received on Tuesday, 26 September 2000 08:43:10 UTC