- From: Kynn Bartlett <kynn-hwg@idyllmtn.com>
- Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:45:52 -0800
- To: Kelly Ford <kford@teleport.com>
- Cc: tvraman@us.ibm.com, "Gregory J. Rosmaita" <unagi69@concentric.net>, WAI Interest Group Emailing List <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
At 12:24 PM 11/16/1999 , Kelly Ford wrote: >I'm not saying readable to Kelly equals accessible. But of the hundreds of >people who are Blind I've worked with on internet access, Yahoo has been a >favorite site because people find it functional. From a realistic point of view, if we say that tables should never be used for layout, we might as well give up right now on trying to sell web designers on accessibility. Tables _are_ and _will_ be used for layout. That genie is not going to go back into the bottle. Insisting that using tables for layout is "wrong" will cost us more than it's worth. We need to choose our battles carefully, and not lock ourselves into a position that is completely unsupportable. Fortunately, technology _has_ advanced enough that tables can be unstacked relatively easily by most assistive tech, and thus "losing" the tables-for-layout battle is an acceptable loss, since it doesn't cause that much damage -- the adaptive technology DOES exist to make them accessible. Therefore I have to respectfully disagree with my good Gregory, and support what Kelly says -- tables for layout, if not used in completely awful ways, _are_ accessible thanks to advances in web technology. -- Kynn Bartlett mailto:kynn@hwg.org President, HTML Writers Guild http://www.hwg.org/ AWARE Center Director http://aware.hwg.org/
Received on Tuesday, 16 November 1999 16:51:17 UTC