Accessibility is hard! Let's go shopping! (was: Debunking the need for "text-only" parallel sites)

At 11:09 AM 5/21/1999 -0400, Jeff Guillaume wrote:
>But this
>is my point (not for me, because I agree with most of you, which is why
>I subscribed to this list in the first place): most Webmasters don't
>have the time nor inclination to learn what they need to learn to make
>valid, accessible Web pages.

Most professional writers don't have the time to learn English!
Grammar and spelling are hard!  The average editor doesn't know
anything about correct use of punctuation!

Maybe I'm an amazingly high quality web designer or something,
but I am really sick of hearing from these supposed web"masters"
that it's not THEIR fault they're grossly incompetent at producing
for the web.  Perhaps if HTML were some incredibly hard and
difficult thing to do, this might make sense, but please, markup
is not rocket science or brain surgery.

If someone can't make a web page that is interoperable, platform
independent, and accessible, they don't deserve to be making
money in this field.  They don't understand the web.

My doctor doesn't use the excuse "sorry, I don't have time to
learn medicine"; my lawyer doesn't claim that copyrights are
too hard to understand but then gives me intellectual property
advice anyway.  If web authoring is to be taken as a serious
profession (and it's part of the HTML Writers Guild's charter
to promote that), then excuses such as "but doing HTML the
riiiiight way is haaaaard" need to be stopped.

--
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@hwg.org>
President, Governing Board Member
HTML Writers Guild <URL:http://www.hwg.org>
Director, Accessible Web Authoring Resources and Education Center
  <URL:http://aware.hwg.org/>

Received on Friday, 21 May 1999 11:59:59 UTC