- From: Kynn Bartlett <kynn-edapta@idyllmtn.com>
- Date: Sat, 06 Oct 2001 11:55:37 -0700
- To: Joe Clark <joeclark@contenu.nu>
- Cc: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org, roerden@bedrockbarn.com, poehlman1@home.com
At 06:42 AM 10/6/2001 , Joe Clark wrote: > From the CHI-Web mailing list: >>Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2001 06:38:42 -0400 >>From: Doug Roerden <roerden@BEDROCKBARN.COM> >> >>Does anyone know of any emerging standards (explicit or implicit) for how to quickly and easily direct screen-reader users to an alternate set of HTML? >>Please send replies directly to me and I'll post a summary to the list. >> >>Doug Roerden >>roerden@bedrockbarn.com Good question. There's not any existing standards which I know of which exactly address that. With development of Composite Capabilities/ Preferences Profiles (CC/PP) there is some hope that user agents (browsers, screenreaders in combination) will be able to self-identify to the server. If a server received a CC/PP profile that was appropriate for a screenreader version of the site, it could deliver that instead, automatically. According to the HTML 4.01 spec (and thus the XHTML 1.0 as well), alternate pages should be marked up with the <link> attribute, like this: <link href="index.scr.html" rel="alternate" media="aural, braille"> The above says "there is an alternate version of the page intended for speech synthesizers or Braille termials at index.scr.html." To the best of my knowledge there aren't any screenreaders which do anything with this information, but I would love to be pleasantly surprised. Intelligent ways to switch between alternate user interfaces are a main topic of development at Reef, my employer, so if you want to talk off-list about what we're working on, you can email me at kynn@reef.com. David Poehlman wrote: >our standards are written to discourage their use. AS for how to direct >someone there you do it the same way you direct anyone else to anything >else except that you make sure it is in text which you should at least >add for everyone else anyway. The standards do _not_ discourage their use. The standards discourage misuse of alternate HTML pages, and misuse is defined as "alternate pages which get out of date, are not maintained, do not contain the full information of the 'real pages' or are not accessible." There is absolutely nothing in W3C WAI specifications which discourages the use of alternate interfaces for specific uses, as long as content is accessible. Mechanisms for shifting views should be accessible as well; this goes without saying I hope. --Kynn -- Kynn Bartlett <kynn@reef.com> Technical Developer Liaison Reef North America Accessibility - W3C - Integrator Network ________________________________________ BUSINESS IS DYNAMIC. TAKE CONTROL. ________________________________________ http://www.reef.com
Received on Saturday, 6 October 2001 14:58:37 UTC