RE: Accessibility, discrimination, and WCAG 2.0

At 1:12 PM -0700 10/22/00, Charles F. Munat wrote:
>Here is a related question: what about mailing lists like this one?
>Most mailing lists require (or at least suggest) the use of plain text.
>There are sound reasons for this wrt accessibility. But to make these posts
>more understandable, wouldn't HTML email be better?

In theory, yes.  Properly marked up text is ALWAYS (well, almost always,
if we looked hard enough we may be able to find exceptions) going to be
"more accessible" -- in theory -- than plaintext.

In practice, of course, we know there're several problems (size, user
agent support, security, privacy) with HTML mail which makes it hard
to deploy as a general solution.  A smart mailing list system would
be able to take either HTML text or plaintext, and send users the
output in the appropriate format according to that user's preferences
upon subscribing.

--Kynn
-- 
--
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>
http://www.kynn.com/

Received on Monday, 23 October 2000 03:00:19 UTC