RE: Your opinion please: comma separated table values

In the case of screen readers.  I think it more productive, overall, to
design speech enabled user agents that better render HTML.  (For example,
T.V. Raman's EmacSpeak running a speech friendly browser.)  Making tables
accessible isn't as much of an issue as making a program that renders tables
in an accessible manner.  (I think you hinted toward this issue.)  The W3C
guidelines do a good job to provide for accessible tables, one must follow
those guidelines.  Of course, following those guidelines doesn't always lead
to accessible tables, to the user, because there are few programs that do a
good job of rendering them.  It seems, to me, that many screen readers spend
a large portion of their code working around bad HTML than following the W3C
guidelines.

Having an alternative format for a spread sheet could be a good thing.
Although, many spreadsheets support HTML table imports these days.  It may
have the side benefit of rendering the table in more accessible software.  I
would expect the link to be marked as an alternative file type, though.  <A
href="someAltFile" rel="alternate"
type="text/comma-separated-values">someAltFileDescription</A>  It might be
nice to place this in a LINK tag in the head. <LINK href="someAltFile"
rel="alternate" type="text/comma-separated-values" title="someFileTitle">  I
know, most browsers don't render this.  But, I would still expect one to use
it for those that do.  Many speech friendly browsers, Lynx for example,
support LINK.

,David Norris

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Received on Wednesday, 17 February 1999 18:18:40 UTC