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

That's why server side redirects are the most efficient way of dealing with
these types of web maintenance issues, they don't cause any of these
problems.

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Cooper

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 15:40:07 UTC