RE: CSS Accessibility Analyzer

> Michael Cooper: 
> Perhaps this issue will be addressed in part by an approach 
> we are taking in the techniques, which is, for each 
> technique, we log the user agents for which there is a known 
> problem the technique addresses. So we could create a 
> technique that says, in effect, "If your target browser 
> includes IE, the author must use relative font sizes. If your 
> target browser is only Opera, the author can use absolute 
> sizes and still be assured that the page will be 
> WCAG-compliant for the user." 

Personally, I utterly dislike the idea of tuning your website to the
browsers you expect your audience uses. That's just one step away from only
supporting the market leader (read: Internet Explorer), a practice which can
be very bad for accessibility. If we encourage authors to write only for
browsers they expect, many of them will not take speech browsers and other
assistive technologies into consideration. 

To me, one of the key elements of web accessibility is that you acknowledge
you cannot know which user will visit your site, and you create your website
to be flexible and robust to meet the user's need. 

Yvette Hoitink
CEO Heritas, Enschede, The Netherlands
E-mail: y.p.hoitink@heritas.nl

Received on Monday, 16 February 2004 14:06:22 UTC