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

At 06:51 PM 11/18/1999 , Claude Sweet wrote:
>I respect you as a person, but I must disagree with your position.
>Asking someone to learn something is fine, but placing an unfunded
>MANDATE that everyone MUST learn html is entirely another matter.

Of course it's unfair.  That's why tools should support accessibility,
and then we wouldn't have this problem -- someone could use Front
Page or Mozilla Editor, and produce a working, accessible web page.

>Education is constantly facing some politician passing a bill to have
>schools perform a specific task, but fails to provide the necessary
>resources to accomplish the mandate.
>It is not fair to impose the task of learning to hand write html code
>and become an experienced web designer. It would be great if funds are
>provided to establish a school or district wide department with paid web
>designers who will take the data from teachers to create an accessible
>web site.

Have you seen the "EMT"/"WAFT" idea?  That's been proposed on 
Scott Leubking's excellent "ba-univ-tech-access" list for just
such a case as this -- a university with trained web designers
who can do the accessibility magic for professors and other
staff who aren't skilled in HTML.

>When html templates are commonly available that demonstrate how to
>produce specific types of web pages, especially constructed to provide
>examples that educators in various grades and disciplines can use -
>then, and only then will you achieve your accessibility goals. 

So, let's work on that. :)  Keep in mind that web accessibility (and
web design itself!) is a very young field -- the Web Content Accessibility
Guidelines _just_ came out this year!

Developing templates is good and useful; we should consider identifying
the needs of those educators for their pages and then providing some
accessible examples.  Would you like to work on this?

-- 
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 23:17:02 UTC