Re: Bobby Limitatation - Workaround Sought

> Phill responds:
> PJ: I don't understand the relationship with Bobby's capability, or any
> other tool's capability for that matter, to crawl a site to build a list of
> pages to analyze and accessibility.  The pages can be perfectly accessible

The failure of a tool to crawl a site is a strong indication that the
site is not suitable for all browsers.  I know there is a tendency here
to weasel out of backward compatibility by defining accessibility in
terms of their existing some (however expensive) assistive technology
that can cope with the site, but I still believe that the designers of
HTML intended it should fail by graceful degradation rather than machine
and software upgrades.

Whilst one may be able to argue that JAWS/IE allows access to a site,
I've had correspondence from blind web users who have ruled JAWS out
as well beyond their means.  Generally people who are neither young, 
with a reasonable disposable income, nor with a strong professional
need to access the internet, are likely to have old machines running
old browsers.  If this were not the case, there would be no market for
WebTV type systems.

One problem with a list like this is that it tends to be easier to have
the time to contribute to it if you have a commercial interest in 
the development of assistive technology (hardware and, particularly,
software).

Received on Wednesday, 11 April 2001 02:39:35 UTC