Re: The first thing that I don't like about the WAI-IG list

At 6:31 PM -0600 2/1/99, Charles F. Munat wrote:
>At 06:19 p.m. 01/02/99 -0600, Kynn Bartlett wrote:
>
>>Once you've invested the time to learn, it's actually
>easier
>>to make an accessible site than to purposely break HTML and
>>make one that's inaccessible.

>That was the point, Kynn. At this time it requires a
>sizeable investment of time (and therefore money) to unlearn
>the old ways and learn the new ways. So I still think it's

I think that's one of the more important points behind the Authoring Tools
guideline.  There are far too many tools out there that don't consider
accessibility at all.  In fact, there are too many tools out there that
create pages 'optimised' for one browser, which creates problems for
*everyone* that doesn't use that browser.

In a perfect world, you'd need to learn a bit about HTML, its history and
uses before you could put a page on the web.  In the real world, it would
just be nice if more of the tools used to create pages took care of the
accessibility issues for you.

>My experience is that learning how to build accessible sites
>and even building them has required a lot of extra effort. I
>would be interested in hearing from other designers on this
>list regarding the amount of time they've invested in
>accessibility related work. Is my experience unique, or have
>others had similar experiences?

It seems as though most of the time I spend on accessibility issues is
reminding/explaining to designers why x is inaccessible or why you need to
consider case y.  Such as using style sheets to create columns.  A series
of topics when the style sheets are turned on appear as

Topic 1   Topic 3   Topic 5
Topic 2   Topic 4   Topic 6

This way, if style sheets aren't on, the topics appear in order down the
page.  At least twice this was explained to people who wanted the columns
to appear as


Topic 1   Topic 2   Topic 3
Topic 4   Topic 5   Topic 6

Which would be a complete hash if style sheets were turned off.

Lynn

lynn.alford@jcu.edu.au | More of your conversation would infect
Teaching and Staff     | my brain.  Coriolanus
Development            | http://www.ultra.net.au/~alford/
Game Review pages at http://www.ultra.net.au/~alford/games2.html

Received on Tuesday, 5 January 1999 18:05:48 UTC