- From: John Foliot - bytown internet <foliot@bytowninternet.com>
- Date: Fri, 24 May 2002 17:54:25 -0400
- To: "Aaron Smith" <aaron@gwmicro.com>, "W3c-Wai-Ig" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Accessible to *you* perhaps, but accessible to all? If you define accessibility as web pages that render coherently to screen readers, then perhaps this page will do. But what about non-standard user-agents? Recently, I took a 2 hour road trip with an associate, who brought along his new RIM Blackberry. While driving down a semi-remote stretch of highway (Ottawa to Montreal) he was checking his emails and wirelessly surfing the web. The HTML page contents were being dynamically re-written to WML to output to the 'berry. Pages that validated delivered the content correctly... pages that did not, well... garbage in, garbage out. (Pages that validated to XHTML were awesome!) To me, accessibility is not JUST the disabled community, although they surely benefit the most. But accessibility means the *message* gets through logically and completely, regardles of how you get it. Acura is supposedly shipping a new car this fall with a web browser embedded into the dash ("oh great"), LG Digital is running TV ads with Internet Ready refridgerators. With these thinner clients coming along, if the content doesn't work in them, then it's inaccessible. Software which is written to deal with kludges and hacks is larger, more prone to buggyness, and usually takes longer to develop, which of course means it costs more (Internet Explorer aside). In contrast, valid HTML only requires that the rendering agent properly interpret the "rules" as specified in the DTD. As the web matures, we _will_ move beyond HTML 4.01 into more XML styled development... we're already moving in that direction today. With this move, stricter interpretations and renderings will be absolutely required. Finally, it was particualrly bothersome that it was a web site which proported to represent International Webmasters - how ironic. JF > > > But yet the page content is still accessible. I agree with a > previous post > regarding the terminology needing to be switched from "inaccessible" to > "does not validate." After all, a page's ability to validate or lack > thereof does not necessarily dictate its accessibility > (fortunately/unfortunately as that may be). > > At 04:29 PM 5/24/2002 -0400, John Foliot - bytown internet wrote: > > >Well, for one, it doesn't even validate!
Received on Friday, 24 May 2002 17:54:46 UTC