- From: Robinson, Norman B - Washington, DC <Norman.B.Robinson@usps.gov>
- Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 08:01:39 -0400
- To: "Joe Clark" <joeclark@joeclark.org>, "WAI-GL" <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Regarding Joe Clark's email sent Monday, June 13, 2005 @4:34PM: I'd like to chime in and affirm the idea that valid code *is* an accessibility issue. I have had examples where incorrect HTML coding has caused the screen reader to not gain access to the information presented in a web browser. Nested tables and comments within tables caused the information to be inaccessible. Pushing the code through a validation (W3C validator in this instance) and changing a few tags to produce valid HTML 'fixed' the problem. I'm not sure if it was the browser, the assistive technology, or a combination of the two that caused the defect, but changing the source HTML and reloading the page provided access. That is to say whatever the state of the assistive technology, the operating system, or the browser, it was the same in both instances and valid code was the solution to provide access. I would have liked to provide more than anecdotal evidence but I don't have a record of the code. I'll try to capture it an provide it as an example if I can reproduce. Regards, Norman B. Robinson Section 508 Coordinator IT Governance, US Postal Service
Received on Tuesday, 14 June 2005 12:01:52 UTC