Re: Frames and accessibility: opinions please

"Phill Jenkins" writes:
>I don't understand what free has to do meeting the 508 or W3C standards.

	The idea is to create a level playing field when it comes
to information technology.  If you have to buy access, then you
get a number of situations, all of which are stifling or negative
in some other way.  There is the money that school systems must
shell out to buy work stations which may cost several orders of
magnitude more than a so-called normal terminal or work station.

	Since the access is not universal, the work stations will
most likely not always be where they are needed.  There may not
be enough of them or they may sit unused for lack of a client who
needs them right now.

	Would it work?  Don't know.  Don't have fifteen-hundred
Dollars to find out that it does not.

	There are a lot of administrators and potential employers
who think like that so that's one more student who is going to
have trouble or one more job seeker that gets a long wait
followed by vague reasons why he or she won't be working for that
company.  It is a heck of a lot easier to just turn it on when
and where you need it and see for yourself if it works and go
from there.  When every telephone is a pay-phone and every road is
a turnpike, one tends to be sparing about the use of such
facilities.
	
	People who fit the descriptor of normal users don't get
shaken down every time they use a computer.  They just use it.

>also don't understand why something must be OS neutral to meet a standard.
>I do understand that free (cost), OS neutral, availability in national
>languages, AT support, etc. were considerations when crafting the standards
>because they gave a sense of reality and implementation status. Can you
>point to where free or OS neutral is part of either standard?

	Doesn't access give a  sense of reality and implementation status?
it has got to work for a large number of people without a lot of
extra trouble and expense and that was why the language support.
To not have done that would have cut the heart out of the whole
project.

>By the way, since LYNX supports FRAMES, if authors put usable titles on
>them, would that end the debate about frames?
>
>Also is LYNX supported JavaScript, would that end the debate about
>JavaScript?

	All this noise would disappear if those of us who use UNIX
could fire up our browsers and go to most sites and actually use
the content in a productive manner.  This does not mean that
everything has to be perfect, only that we can get whatever job
needs to be done done.  That could be anything from having some
sort of interactive chat to reading and writing documents for a
class, you name it.

	The last time I checked, the Internet was not owned by
anybody yet.  It is more like the Interstate highway system that
will basically fit anything with wheels.

	UNIX is what best fits my job and hobbies.  With the
exception of web browsers, I can generally do anything I want to
do because the UNIX command line is accessible in its native
form.

	I work for a major public university and I would feel
much better as a tax-payer if access to the web was just there
to be had for everybody who can use the computer without an
auxiliary cash transplant which often-times doubles the price of
a work station.


	The technology used by web servers needs to be reasonable
to encourage open-source development such as lynx.

	There needs to be a Plan B.  Right now, it's not working
for a large segment of the blind population, even those who are
using Windows.

	We need to think workable as well as cool.  Links that
don't work or pages that are blank are not cool.  they are just
stupid.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
OSU Center for Computing and Information Services Network Operations Group

Received on Monday, 29 April 2002 17:28:16 UTC