Re: Accessible CSS rollovers again

> 
> * Text inside GIFs.
>   A picture of text inside a GIF complete with alt
> and title is accessible;  the claimed drawbacks of
> screen-magnification software are unfounded because only the

The draw back is with respect to the font size accessibility options
in the browser, not external magnifier software.  IE, NS6/Mozilla, and,
I think NS4, all have this feature.  These browser font size overrides
all scale the outlines.

> * Images, complete with alt texts, sitting inside <hx> tags.

Stalemate issue.  Actually most of this is stalemate as it is the
old structuralist/presentationalist argument.

> 	Web designers take a dim view of accessibility because
> accessibility advocates cling to primitive, outdated, and clearly

HTML was designed to be deliberately less sophisticated than
presentational tools (e.g. Acrobat) of its time.  This attribute of
HTML dates back to its origins - part of the confusion is that 
Netscape marketed successfully into the Acrobat market, and Adobe failed
to spot the market.  Netscape used HTML for this market because they had
expertise from Mosaic, not because it was the best tool for the job.  They
knew the money was not in information distribution tools but in advertising
tools.

Advertising use of the web would have been much more honest if Adobe had
added web linking before Netscape cornered the market, although the fact
that you could hand code HTML more easily than PostScript/PDF, at the time,
probably made a difference as well, as Adobe's business model was based
on selling authoring tools, at a time when students were handcoding web
pages with "free" editors.

Received on Monday, 12 August 2002 02:21:08 UTC