Re: How Much Of A Problem Are Tables Used for Design?

At 01:54 PM 11/18/1999 , Claude Sweet wrote:
>I get the feeling that there is a secret society promoting Accessibility
>and everyone who joins MUST suffer the pain and steep learning process
>in order to qualify for membership all the while someone keeps hollering
>"Its easy to do, if I can learn how to write accessible code - so can
>you!"

Actually the problem is that there aren't any tools which are that
good at accessibility.  I wish there were -- and so does the WAI, that's
why the Authoring Tools Accessibility Guidelines were written.

If you look at ATAG (and you should! they're in final review for a
W3C recommendation), you'll see that few tools really do measure up
even minimally.

Which means that it's not a case of secret hidden knowledge in web
accessibility, it's a case that we can't just say "just Tool Y, it
will do the job for you!"  Sadly, in order to create accessible
markup, you -will- have to do some correction of what your web
creation tool gives you.  That's a harsh reality of life, but one
controlled by the tool makers, not by the hand coders.

Fortunately, though, markup _is_ gawshawfulsimple, and is some of
the easiest computer "programming" [sic] you'll ever have to do.
Thus, it's not that bad to ask someone to learn HTML, if they want
to be able to do it right.

-- 
Kynn Bartlett                                    mailto:kynn@hwg.org
President, HTML Writers Guild                    http://www.hwg.org/
AWARE Center Director                          http://aware.hwg.org/

Received on Thursday, 18 November 1999 18:40:33 UTC