Taking the Kynn Challenge!

I am pleased to share that I have a vendor that is taking me up on an offer
to demonstrate that their site can be made to comply with all Priority 1
items of the WCAG.

In truth, they have already made effort to ensure accessibility, and have
largely achieved this goal.  They even went so far as to have some actual
live blind folks (from the NFB) surf their site!  That is a great practice,
of course, but once they got a blessing from some non-experts (whose only
qualification, apparently, was being blind), they stopped. This should be a
fairly high profile site, so I am hoping to get them to go the extra mile,
and I am optimistic they will.

Please take a look at the original home page at URL:
http://www.mdtechshowcase.com/index.html
and compare it with my version of at URL:
http://www.dors.state.md.us/mdshowcase.html

1)    Do you see any differences in the presentation between the two?

2)    Do you agree that my version has earned the A rating?

3)    The original authors are not content with some of the (illegal) code
that I have deleted (like "margin").  I told them we can either put this
back in (and sacrifice real HTML validity, but keep the A rating) or use
style sheets (and maybe even earn AA).  Thoughts on this point?  Is there
another way?

4)    I also had to delete a bunch of attributes VLINK and ALINK (etc.) from
TD elements.  Are there ANY elements (besides BODY and CSS thank you) that
can take these attributes?

5)    My implementations of Java and JavaScript ALTernatives are less than
satisfactory to me.  Suggestions?

6)    The original also includes a form tool that uses JavaScript.  I don't
think it is cross platform anyway, but what is the best way to fix the
snippet of code below so that it validates?  (I replaced <Q>name="test"</Q>
with <Q>action=""</Q>, but that is an obvious kludge!  This "fix" validated,
but now I am afraid it is broken EVERYWHERE now!)  Is there a valid way to
achieve this functionality that works with the 4x versions of MSIE and
Navigator?  Is there a way (short of a .cgi script) that will allow a
similar functionality with Lynx?

Thank you all very much!
Code fragements follow...


<script type="application/javasript">

<!--

 function navigator(form) {

 location.href=(form.test.options[form.test.selectedIndex].value);

 }

// -->

</script>

...

<form method="POST" name="test">

 <select name="test" size="1" onchange="navigator(this.form)">

  <option selected value="- REGISTER NOW! -">- Choose -</option>

  <option value="attendees.htm">Attendees</option>

  <option value="exhibitor.htm">Exhibitor</option>

  <option value="sponsorz.htm">Sponsor</option>

  <option value="speaker.htm">Speaker</option>

 </select>

</form>

Received on Wednesday, 10 November 1999 15:29:34 UTC