Re: FWD: CHI-WEB: Amazon's version for the Visually Impaired

> THe 2.0 guidelines are designed to cover the changed circumstance that XML
> is the current way to present content and Presentation is separated by such

That is not the perception of designers.  They still keep asking on
www-html for changes in the HTML standard after discovering that XHTML
transitional doesn't support certain proprietory presentational attributes
associated with frames and framesets (and most of them haven't realised
that frames are deprecated and require semantics outside of CSS, with
transitional XHTML).  They hanker for HTML (NS4) and HTML (IE5), not
XML/CSS or even HTML (W3C).

Most content authors (and even more content commissioners) seem unable
to understand the simple structure of HTML, so will want to stick with
tag soup implementations of it rather than move to strictly structured
XML (they are probably lost causes for many accessibility features, but
I would argue that they represent the majority of real life pages -
even the National Organisation for Disablities web page quoted recently
was structurally broken, one of the reasons why it couldn't get level
2 compliance).

Also, from a generalised accessibility point of view, there are now 
HTML appliances locked into HTML 3.2 (approx) which are the means to
provide web access to those too old to learn new technologies (the
video recorder programming syndrome) and which may well have lifetimes of
the order of a decade.  Also, in many parts of the world people's only
access to the internet is through machines that are too old to run
the browsers needed for XML/CSS.

In the context of Bobby, one member of this list indicated that they
have very limited financial means.  That, again, is an indication that
many disabled (not those interesting to businesses, though) will have
great financial difficulties in tracking technology - this applies to
the "digital divide" more generally.

Received on Saturday, 15 December 2001 05:26:54 UTC