RE: Fw: Disturbing trend in tables

Dear Anne,
Comments in line...

>      There may be an "untapped market" for the authoring tool you
> describe,
> but I serious doubt it would be "huge" ... And, taking out features folks
> commonly use (and they way they use them) is sure to diminish the market
> further. If you remove the Underline, you are probably going to make some
> folks' lives extra hard as they have to decide how else to express those
> items that are customarily underlined, such as titles. (students and
> profs,
> and uni's that publish papers on the web.) Remember that B, I and U are
> "crutches" used by sighted folks to interact with text. To kick out the
> crutches of some PWD's so that other PWD's don't stumble over them seems a
> bit harsh.
> 
Using <B> and <I> instead of <STRONG> and <EM> (physical markup versus
logical) is illustrative of a fundamental lack of understanding of HTML.  It
is quite sad that the most popular editors promote this bad behavior.  Using
<U> is worse.   There a number of better choices, including <CITE>,
<ADDRESS>, and <EM>.  Underlining text in a web page is confusing,
especially to folks with LD, because people have come to associate underline
with active links.

> 	Incidently, after reading that Front Page has no issues with how
> PWD's use
> the web pages it produces, I will continue my recommendation to new web
> creators to use it. It is a very easy-to-use authoring tool that can be
> learned by folks who *do* something else, and web creations are just
> another computer-aided task. Local uni's are teaching Word to teachers who
> take their tech enrichment classes. The other software you mentioned all
> seemed to have too serious user problems for newbies.
> 
Where did you read that Front Page has no issues with how PWD's us the web
pages it produces?  Certainly you did not find that nugget of information on
this list.  Your own experience indicates that this isn't true!  (You say as
much in the paragraph after next!)  So how, in good conscious, can you
recommend Front Page to people who know LESS than you about HTML and
disabilities?

> 	Yes, it would be nice if all web authors followed the sage advice of
> those
> who envision a web of this or that, but that's probably about as likely as
> picking up a newspaper that does NOT have an error in it. I just talked to
> a reporter today about doing a story on the kids' e-mail experience with
> Israel, and already know that he's going to get some of the historical
> data
> wrong. He asked how I got my "Israeli contact", and I said it was through
> this list, and then had to explain in 10 words, what the WAI is about.
> <grin ... I didn't get past the blind using the computers and the web!>
> 
Yes, there are lot's of inspiring stories about how the web changes lives.
Yes, mistakes get made in print.  I'm not sure I understand the point you
are trying to make.

> 	I truly hope that Front Page has made all possible corrections by
> the time
> teachers come under the government aegis to build pages to a "standard"
> outside of how they are intended to be used. I'm using FP98 now, and
> notice
> there is a menu that allows you to set classes and stuff ... but I haven't
> explored it further. Seems like recently I've been adding a web page per
> week to the kids' site ... and I only have weekend days to do it in. I
> can't add but so much extra work. I've made pages in Front Page, and in
> Publisher and Front Page which passed Bobby, but they took a lot more time
> than the pages I'm doing weekly now.
> 
Okay, so you acknowledge that authoring pages which pass Bobby (i.e., making
pages which are accessible) is difficult with Front Page.  This is exactly
the point I am trying to make!  Web authoring packages, IMHO, should, AT THE
VERY LEAST, produce VALID html.  (How tough and obvious is that?)  They
should also facilitate the creation of accessible pages.  Yes, one CAN
produce accessible pages with Front Page.  But, IT IS MORE WORK THAN IT
NEEDS TO BE.  I would love mainstream tools to enforce accessibility, but I
realize that is too tough a sell.  Validity, on the other hand, is extremely
easy (at least for an automated tool).  Happily, there is a very high
correlation between accessibility and validity (at least with HTML 4 and
latter), so I would gladly settle for that.

Received on Wednesday, 17 January 2001 09:08:55 UTC