Jakob Nielsen's PDF format report

At 3:39 PM -0500 12/24/01, David Poehlman wrote:
>seems to me that if he was writing about accesibility, he'd have had a
>perfect opportunity to demonstrate it.

Sure, it would be nice, but there's no easy way to make money from
selling a collection of HTML files.  Heck, there's not even a standard
way to -package_ HTML files as you can with PDF.

Let's put it this way.  If I could make an audio tape which I could
then sell to the thousands or millions of web developers who can
hear, and then they would produce accessible web sites, accessible
to everyone after hearing this, should I do that?  Or should I decide
not to, because the much, much, much smaller percentage of web
developers who can't hear -- who may ALREADY know something about
web access anyway -- couldn't use my tape?

When it comes down to it, Jakob's audience is NOT blind users and
web developers.  Those people, quite frankly, already know that the
web sucks when it comes to usability, and nearly all of them could
come up with their own set of recommendations _anyway_.

His primary audience for this was not people with disabilities.
Ergo, he used a format that met the needs of his primary audience
as well as his primary business goal of selling a complete package
in an easily usable format.  You'll note that nobody else has
provided a better format -- a tar file of HTML pages comes
nowhere close, for example.  Perhaps the onus should be on the
W3C to provide such a format which can replace or parallel PDF
use?

When I write a book -- such as the XML and CSS books I'm currently
working on -- you can bet your booty that I talk about accessibility,
even to the point that my editors raise eyebrows and ask me to
tone it down.  Now, none of those books (especially those with
extensive screenshots) are written for anything other than an
audience which can read and can see.  Would it be better if I just
left out the accessibility stuff?  Or just not write books at all,
since some of my friends wouldn't get to read them?

--Kynn

PS:  Frankly, I find the price of Jakob's study much more
      objectionable than the delivery format.

-- 
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>                 http://kynn.com
Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain            http://idyllmtn.com
Web Accessibility Expert-for-hire          http://kynn.com/resume
January Web Accessibility eCourse           http://kynn.com/+d201

Received on Monday, 24 December 2001 21:33:00 UTC