- From: Brian Kelly <lisbk@ukoln.ac.uk>
- Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1998 13:15:14 -0000
- To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org, Kynn Bartlett <kynn-hwg@idyllmtn.com>
Kynn Bartlett said: ... >The amount of "inconvenience" necessary to create accessible websites >is MINIMAL, especially when compared to the amount of time, energy, >and money that is regularly invested in inaccessible, unusable >"cutting edge" advances. > >In other words, putting a table in HTML costs a FRACTION of the cost of >making, say, an animated, interactive java map that only a subset of >your audience can use. Although I agree with most of the comments on this thread, I disagree with this statement. There can be a significant cost in deploying authoring tools which create accessible websites. Not only the cost of the authoring tool itself, but also costs in training, etc. in using a new tool. As has been pointed out, many HTML authors use free tools (such as Netscape Gold) or conversion tools in word processing packages (such as MS Word's Internet Assistant) because they are (a) free and (b) have a shallow learning curve, being integrated with the user's browsing / wp tool. (For example many organisations recommend MS Word as an HTML authoring tools as the support costs are very small for existing Word users, although this solution results in very poor quality HTML and makes it difficult to provide and maintaing ALT text for images). In addition there are costs in deploying new accessible formats (e.g. CSS) in a world in which there are many millions of copies of flawed browsers (try printing a document containing a CSS .margin-left elemnt to indent the text in an accessible way - no misuse of tables - in Netscape 4 and see what happens). Restricting the use of CSS to "safe" features is expensive, especially as tools don't enable you to do this. Solutions such as the user-agent negotiation for safe CSS features (as provided at the W3C Style Sheet gallery [1]) are also expensive as they require (expensive) programming expertise to deploy. I'm not saying that organisations shouldn't be prepared to make this investment, simply that WAI is doing a disservice in implying that the solution is always cheap. Brian Kelly [1] http://www.w3.org/StyleSheets/Core/ ------------------------------------------------------ Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus UKOLN, University of Bath, BATH, England, BA2 7AY Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Homepage: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/b.kelly.html Phone: 01225 323943 FAX: 01225 826838
Received on Wednesday, 18 November 1998 08:15:22 UTC