Re: Most Web Books Ignore Accessibility and Usability

May I add the following from personal experience:
I wrote an eBook in 1998/9 on HTML, CSS, XHTML with reference to WAI and
strictly following the W3C recommendations. The eBook is used successfully in
training - both private colleges and university. When I contacted publishers for
a paper-based version, nobody was interested.
The eBook is still available - although it now needs a good revision. It
consists of more than 800 HTML files with about 50'000 links, with hundreds of
examples of what is supposed to happen as opposed to what does happen (ie
browser interpretation).
Regards
Jacques

David Woolley wrote:

> > 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>

- --
___________________
Dr Jacques Steyn

+27 (0)11 478-1259
http://www.knowsystems.com

Received on Friday, 9 March 2001 06:33:04 UTC