RE: Problems with OTACS-2

Anne,

Thanks for your comments.  And unfortunately I am not yet 100%, but
getting there!  I have added more comments where necessary.

---- If someone has stylesheets, why would they turn them off ?

One way elderly people browse through web sites is by turning off the
stylesheets provided by the author and over-riding them with their own.
Thus manipulating colour, text size, font etc. Thus if an author creates
a site with stylesheets it must be possible to turn these stylesheets
off and still be able to browse through the site. I believe this is
Checkpoint 6.1 (A).

---- Speech readers are not as readily available as updates to IE, free
plug-ins, and other tools, but users who can't read are expected to use
them.

Users who can't read aren't *expected* to use them as such, they are an
aid in browsing. Just like a Seeing Eye Dog costs money to feed etc. a
blind person is also expected to outlay some money due to their
disability in web browsing (having said this a speech-synthesis
screen-reader is available free with later versions of Windows).  I
agree with you that this is unfortunate, because often these groups of
people are in the lower income ranges. I believe accessibility is
however dealing with whether or not the information is available to that
person. With a screen-reader and an accessible site the information is.

---- Perhaps we need to identify the tools that do not work with
specific ATs and set about updating the tools so they can be 
so used.

I agree with you, however we will still need to incorporate the workings
of older versions of these tools in the WCAG 2.0. Because the disability
audience is of the lower income range I believe we need to consider
older versions of tools (OS / browsers / plugins / ATs), because they
will tend to stick around for awhile.

---- If Adobe works with all ATs, why not expect the user to have it? Is
this not so everywhere? Are we being to US-Centric?

This comment applies to all plugins. I don't think you are being too
US-centric - you are correct, Adobe is everywhere. However, Adobe is not
available on some technical environments. As I said above, the point I
believe of accessibility is to ensure that the information in the site
is available to that person. If someone is using a text-only browser in
Linux, how will they read that PDF? Plugins such as javascripting for
mouseovers are device-dependent, and so not available to people who use
only a keyboard. Flash does not provide a text equivalent, and often if
the user does not have Flash (using Linux, hasn't downloaded it for
space/security/firewall reasons) the site is unavailable to them. Using
a combination of Flash and javascripting often means a person using a
screen-reader cannot access the site at all. I believe this is
Checkpoint 6.3 (A)

Would be interested to hear what anyone has to say.

Cheers,
Gian