Re: Most Web Books Ignore Accessibility and Usability

> My recent studies show an ignorance of accessibility and usability in
> most published books addressing preparation of materials for the internet.

Skimming most such books shows a general ignorance of the web standards 
in general.  They tend to be collections of things that empirically 
"work" on tbe big two browsers.  Also, as commercial books, they tell
their readers what they want to know, not what they ought to know.

On this second point, there is probably no value in trying to reach the
authors; they will probably take the standard commercial position, as
recently taken by Chris Wilson on the www-html mailing list, that 
commercial organisations only have a responsibility to meet their customer
demands, not the public good.  You have to change the customer demands,
which will be more difficult.  You probably have to write your own books
which meet those demands better than the existing books.

> --=====================_18499184==_.ALT
> Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii"
> 

An informal sampling of mailing list postings shows that an increasing
proportion of mailing list authors are ignorant of the fact that their
mail programs include travesties of HTML bloating the size of their
article without including any extra information.

> <html>
> My recent studies show an ignorance of accessibility and usability
> in<br>
> most published books addressing preparation of materials for the
> internet. <br>

Received on Friday, 9 March 2001 02:57:31 UTC