Re: why ALT text alone doesn't suffice for many blind/VI users

At 01:06 PM 10/20/2000 , Gregory J. Rosmaita wrote:
>i simply believe very strongly that the WG needs to shy away from blanket statements such as "this is sufficient for disability group A" and "this is what members of disability group B should do" with the implicit (albeit mostly unconscious) unstated terminating clause, "instead of complaining to us" -- real life ain't that easy, and the utility of lumping individuals into amorphous categories which bear monolithic names, such as "the blind", "the deaf", and the "cognitively impaired/disabled" troubles me immensely..

But we -are- saying "This is what web designers should do" and we
need to be able to justify all those.

If a page is designed in a way that it -can- be read, and there are
freely available solutions which one can choose to use -- such as
running Lynx with a high font size? -- then why exactly is it unfair
to suggest that is a viable option?

For people who are blind, we say "give them text" -- and that assumes
the use of proper assistive technology and settings on that assistive
tech in order to meet their needs.  In other words, we assume a blind
person will use a screenreader, a braille terminal, or something else
which can convert text into a form they can use, if the tool is given
enough information to do so.

Why should it be different for other people?  (Lynx, IE 5, and other
browsers which can overcome this problem are free and even the "costly"
Opera is a fraction of the cost of, say, JAWS or a braille display.)

-- 
Kynn Bartlett  <kynn@idyllmtn.com>                    http://kynn.com/
Director of Accessibility, Edapta               http://www.edapta.com/
Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain Internet   http://www.idyllmtn.com/
AWARE Center Director                      http://www.awarecenter.org/
What's on my bookshelf?                         http://kynn.com/books/

Received on Friday, 20 October 2000 19:29:01 UTC