Re: Browser and Technology Support [Was: Re: [w3c-wai-gl] <none>]

--- Jim Ley <jim@e-media.co.uk> wrote:
> "Wendy A Chisholm" <wendy@w3.org>
> > There are many good cases that e-commerce sites build for using
> scripting.
> 
> Please make them?  If we look at a popular e-commerce site, say
> http://www.tesco.com , we see they throw their extensive scripting and
> make an accessible site without any http://www.tesco.com/access/
> Scripting can bring usability and acccessibility enhancements.

MM
As someone who has designed an accessible, frameless, scriptless online grocery
site (Webvan), as well as redesigning an inaccessible, frameful and scriptful
one (HomeGrocer), I can say with some certainty that Tesco chose its path only
partly for accessibility concerns (and the site says as much). Other concerns
include downlevel browsers and other devices. Were these not a consideration,
I'm sure they could have made an accessible site that did integrate script to
manage, say, cart contents on the client. (I prototyped this as well.)

The user experience without script is prone to error and, quite honestly,
abysmal, particularly in online grocery. It's not a viable approach for many
sites to design sites to function both with and without script and across
browser versions. If it is possible to allow users of assistive technologies to
work with existing sites, even where they require JavaScript, I think we should
absolutely show how to do so, and allow for a claim of compliance.

The issue here (at least from my side) isn't whether JavaScript should be
required in order to make existing HTML/CSS-based sites more accessible (which
I think was your objection), but providing success criteria and compliance
scenarios for sites which insist that the functionality of JavaScript is
necessary.

-
m

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Received on Tuesday, 25 September 2001 13:29:10 UTC