RE: Redirect (Re: Request for review: updated HTML Techniques dra ft)

My opinion about redirect and refresh - the problem is that the user may be
surprised and their screen reader interrupted, lose their place if they're
using a screen magnifier, etc., if a page redirects or refreshes after a
period of time. I think the WCAG 1.0 guideline about redirect was a
precursor to the more general requirement in Section 508 about any kind of
timed process, which has been introduced into WCAG 2.0. But, if a redirect
has no timeout associated with it, that is the page redirects instantly, I
believe that is not an accessibility problem since the user won't have
started interacting with the page by the time it changes. Of course a
*refresh* with a timeout of 0 would have no meaning. So redirects and
refresh with a timeout create a problem, but redirects without a timeout do
not. As Jens says, (untimed) redirects are an important way of keeping a
site in one piece after a redesign, among other purposes.

I am not speaking to the merits of server-side vs. client-side
refresh/redirect here. The existing discussion is a good one. I'm just
trying to clarify that it's not the redirect itself that is a problem, it's
the timed nature of it.

Michael

Received on Tuesday, 28 October 2003 12:31:45 UTC