Re: Accessibility of the White House site

Bruce,

Right now the site sends the same "text only" version to the WAVE, just 
like lynx, Bobby, etc.  (I'll add a feature to get around that--thanks for 
bringing this up.)

For now, however, lynx provides a way to get the NN or IE pages.

Use the option "o" to bring up options and go to the "user agent" 
option.  You can then type in any browser you want.  If you type in MSIE 
5.01 lynx will get the page that MSIE 5.01 would get.  For Netscape, you 
use something like
Mozilla/4.72  etc.  In other words, you type in the user agent names that 
appear in typical server logs.

Note however that lynx warns that "mis-representation of the user agent may 
be a copyright violation".   Are there any lawyers in the audience who 
would want to comment on that?

Len

p.s.

Also, on a more techie note, this method of posing as Netscape or IE isn't 
going to work with all web sites.   It only works here because 
www.whitehouse.gov apparently just checks the user agent string in the HTTP 
request. There  are browser sniffing methods that use javascript in the web 
page to check for javascript objects, and write to the page 
accordingly.  Simply claiming to be netscape or ie wouldn't fool these 
methods unless the browser actually has the javascript objects they are 
looking for.



At 11:55 AM 7/17/00 -0400, Bruce Bailey wrote:
>Len,
>Can you get the WAVE to pull up the Netscape or IE version (they are
>different) of http://www.whitehouse.gov/ ?  From what I can tell, all other
>"browsers" (including Lynx, Amaya, Bobby, WAVE, and presumable Opera and
>early versions of NN and IE) get an accessible but "dumbed-down" version of
>the site.
>--
>Cheers,
>Bruce Bailey

--
Leonard R. Kasday, Ph.D.
Institute on Disabilities/UAP, and
Department of Electrical Engineering
Temple University 423 Ritter Annex, Philadelphia, PA 19122

kasday@acm.org
http://astro.temple.edu/~kasday

(215) 204-2247 (voice)  (800) 750-7428 (TTY)

The WAVE web page accessibility evaluation assistant: 
http://www.temple.edu/inst_disabilities/piat/wave/

Received on Wednesday, 19 July 2000 08:47:34 UTC