Re: How to convince businesses to be accessible...

In other words you had got better information thn I assumed. (Although it is
possible to use various plug-ins with browsers such as IE and Netscape to
render MathML...)
cheers

charles


On Tue, 10 Oct 2000, Ryan Eby wrote:

  I may not have went into enough detail first time through. The logic we were
  using when we did the ASP,XML,XSL approach was to make certain accessibility
  guidelines easier to accomplish. An example would be checkpoint 3.1, which
  states that if an appropriate markup exists you should use it. Unfortunately
  not all browsers support all the languages, so our logic was to use MathML,
  for instance, in browsers that supported it and send a GIF (with appropriate
  ALT text) of the equation if the browser did not. Another reason was that
  some browsers choke on and render stylesheets or markup it doesn't know
  horribly, so our logic was to send a different stylesheet/markup or none at
  all depending on the browser. The end product being clean HTML without any
  hacked areas used to keep a site cross-platform/cross-browser. We never
  thought of using this method as a sole way of accessibility. Just because
  someone has a recent browser doesn't mean they don't have JavaScript or
  images turned off, so the other guidelines were always thought of when
  designing (still functions without scripts, meaning holds without image,
  etc.). I just thought this was a good way of meeting some of the guidelines
  and keeping as clean presentation as possible.
  
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: "Charles McCathieNevile" <charles@w3.org>
  To: "Ryan Eby" <ebyryan@msu.edu>
  Cc: <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
  Sent: Tuesday, October 10, 2000 12:50 PM
  Subject: Re: How to convince businesses to be accessible...
  
  
  > One problem is that although I use lynx I actually prefer to get the
  images
  > included in the source - every so often I decide to look at one, which is
  > very trivial.
  >
  > The basic difficulty is that what browser a user has is not a good guide
  to
  > what are the preferences and needs of the user - that needs to be answered
  by
  > hte users themselves. W3C is working on a system called CC/PP (that's
  easier
  > to remember than the real name) designed to allow this kind of information
  to
  > be sent by the browser to the server. And there are in fact a lot of
  people
  > using these kinds of approaches. The simplest version is to provide a link
  to
  > a text-only version of a page (This is helpful to some users but not by
  > itself a solution), and there are many other methods used. The trick is to
  > get the right information about the user and what they want, and that is
  not
  > easy.
  >
  > Cheers
  >
  > Charles McCN
  >
  > On Fri, 6 Oct 2000, Ryan Eby wrote:
  >
  >   A friend of mine did this on his site with ASP (as a learning tool - his
  >   site is not commercial). He wrote all his content in XML pages and then
  used
  >   a ASP page to check the HTTP header to find the browser version and then
  >   apply a different XSL stylesheet depending on the browser. It was then
  sent
  >   off to the browser as HTML. If the browser was one that didn't support
  >   images than he used a stylesheet that left out the images and HTML that
  >   might have been a hindrance. It may seem like a lot of work but it
  really
  >   wasn't. He only created the content once and about a half dozen
  stylesheets.
  >   And the ASP code he wrote once and then copy and pasted it for the other
  >   pages changes the content variable to point to the proper file. It
  worked
  >   quite well as far as I could see (on lynx, NS, and IE). I'd give you the
  >   link but he is running it locally on his machine now because of lack of
  >   extra funds for hosting). Are there any problems with this approach that
  I
  >   am missing.
  >   _____________________________
  >   Ryan Eby
  

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile    mailto:charles@w3.org    phone: +61 (0) 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative                      http://www.w3.org/WAI
Location: I-cubed, 110 Victoria Street, Carlton VIC 3053, Australia
September - November 2000: 
W3C INRIA, 2004 Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Wednesday, 11 October 2000 05:44:18 UTC