RE: CSS accessibility problems: is markup dead?

Hi Jim,

A good piece - your have a reasonable point and argue it well. On the
downside I would say that it only gives part of the story. You make the
point that using e.g. <SPAN> rather than <H1> for things that are headers is
lacking something, though you don't actually pin down what it is. IMHO, I'd
say that thing was metadata, that h1 should be considered more important
than h2 and so on. It can be reasonably argued that the use of 'legacy' HTML
3.2 markup is one way of providing such information, and I think that is
essentially what you do in this piece. Another way may be to use named
classes, like "tophead" in your example, though of course it would be better
if they came from well-known vocabularies - class="h1" perhaps? Hopefully in
years to come the W3C's activities in the region of metadata will develop
and provide a consistent, simple approach to situations like this, and we
won't need to rely on a vocabulary of maybe two dozen terms plus fairly
arbitrary nesting rules to explain our document's structure (at this point
somebody reminds me of a standard that does this already ;-). For now at
least, I reckon what you've written makes good pragmatic sense.

Cheers,
Danny.

---
Danny Ayers
<stuff> http://www.isacat.net </stuff>


>-----Original Message-----
>From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org]On
>Behalf Of Jim Byrne
>Sent: 14 May 2002 16:33
>To: W3c_Access
>Subject: CSS accessibility problems: is markup dead?
>
>
>I have published a new article on the Making Connections Unit (MCU) Website
>about access issues related to the use of Cascading Style Sheets
>(CSS).  You
>can find it here: http://www.mcu.org.uk/articles/cssaccessproblems.html
>
>In this article:
>
>* How CSS is being used to mimic proper HTML tags.
>* Why using standard HTML is still important.
>* Why using cascading style sheets improperly can make Web pages less
>accessible.
>
>I am interested to hear your feedback. Of course I don't want to discourage
>people from using CSS for presentation and layout, but I think it is worth
>highlighting possible accessibility problems that may occur when
>using them.
>
>If you have an article related to accessible Web design and would like to
>publish it on the MCU Website, don't hesitate to get in touch.
>
>All the best,
>Jim
>
>--
>Jim Byrne Project Director, The Making Connections Unit, Glasgow Caledonian
>University, Glasgow G4 OBA, 0141 331 3893
>
>The Making Connections Unit provides guidance, information and services to
>those who would like to ensure that the information they publish on the Web
>is accessible to everyone.
>
>Services: Website Accessibility Audits, Accessible Web design, Accessible
>Website Management Training.
>
>The Making Connections Unit: http://www.mcu.org.uk/
>Scottish Disability Information Mailing list:
>http://www.mcu.org.uk/mailinglists/
>

Received on Wednesday, 15 May 2002 17:01:29 UTC