RE: single browser intranets

At 10:21 AM 10/26/1999 -0700, Waddell, Cynthia wrote:
>On the other hand, if a company does not address accessibility in their
>intranet environment, they cannot deny employment to a person with a
>disability simply because the company did not think ahead and design for
>accessibility.  

Yes, this is the accessibility issue.  However, designing for and
supporting one browser _on the intranet_ only means that when they
hire their new blind employee, they need to make sure that they have
the right assistive software (read: they need to buy JAWS or IBM
Home Page Reader) and that it works with their intranet application
(read: they need to test and possibly make minor changes to the
programs).

It doesn't mean that they need to, in advance, provide support for
all possible types of browsers accessing their intranet.  That's a
requirement for internet websites, and it also makes sense for
extranets, but for intranets, you are assumed to have a greater
ability to control what is used there, and so you can increase the
functionality and decrease the cost of application development
by designing _only_ for IE 5.0 or something.

Again, in an Intranet, it _is_ possible to create an accessible
application that can only be used with IE 5.0 +/- JAWS.

--
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 Tuesday, 26 October 1999 15:10:24 UTC