Re: JavaScript and Accessibility

> 2) Why do some people want to use a no-JavaScript browser like Lynx?

Some people and some organisations don't want to use JavaScript in IE,
because of the security implications.  Anyone religiously follow 
Microsoft security advice will have disabled it on several occassions.

The blind use Lynx because they can't convince their employer that 
browser use is necessary to perform their job (if they can, the price
of JAWS is probably peanuts compared with that of fixing the organisation's
intranet sites).

The sighted use it because it is very efficient at accessing sites with
rich and deep information (typically academic and some government sites,
although some UK governments sites are outsourced to typical commercial
site designers, and dumbed down).  When you are doing a search for
information, and unless someone has a monopoly on the information
(e.g. product technical manuals), hitting a site that looks very bad
in Lynx is usually a very strong indication that you would be wasting
your time trying to find anything except hype on that site, even in a
GUI browser.

If you want to buy things cheaply, you tend to be forced to use sites
done to typical commercial standards, although even then, I need to be
an existing customer or they need to have some sort of monopoly before
I will go past a blank home page or one with dead links, as the result
of scripting only, or Flash, design techniques.

> 3) Why do we not have a similar guideline about scripts in Section 508?

It appears to have been toned down, presumably because of lobbying from
people who think they can't do without scriptng.

Incidentally, search engines can't handle general case scripting (they
cannot know whether a script will ever terminate) and I'm not sure that
many bother with recognizing common idioms.

Received on Thursday, 12 June 2003 17:24:06 UTC