- From: David Norris <kg9ae@geocities.com>
- Date: Wed, 17 Feb 1999 18:18:52 -0500
- To: "Leonard R. Kasday" <kasday@acm.org>
- Cc: <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>, <piat@egroups.com>
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 World Wide Web - http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Lab/1652/ Page via mail - 412039@pager.mirabilis.com ICQ Universal Internet Number - 412039 E-Mail - kg9ae@geocities.com
Received on Wednesday, 17 February 1999 18:18:40 UTC