- From: P.H.Lauke <P.H.Lauke@salford.ac.uk>
- Date: Sat, 27 Dec 2003 13:40:51 -0000
- Cc: "WAI-IG" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Geoff Denning wrote: >One thing we have to try and destroy is this myth that making a text >only page addresses the accessibility concern. That just shows the >level of ignorance, that when you take markup our of a document, it >renders it even more meaningless and inaccessible. It's really dumbing >things down. Exactly. So many sites I come across that proudly display their Betsie-based text-only version, claiming that they're accessibility minded... It gives the site owners a false sense of security. It's a stop gap solution at best, and certainly does nothing for users with cognitive disabilities who benefit from having additional auditory and/or visual information to complement the pure text (and yes, Betsie will still not solve the problem of multimedia content - text transcripts, captioning, etc). Even some 100% blind users that I have spoken to told me that they do not usually choose to browse these text-only versions, and only use them as a last resort when the actual "main" site turns out to be completely inaccessible. Part of it is probably still the fear that the text-only version might be a cut-down version that's out of date, not updated as frequently as the rest of the site (which is admittedly a moot point when it comes to text-only versions that are generated server-side on the fly, as with Betsie and its clones). Nevertheless, only a minority of visitors benefit from text-only versions, and with properly coded sites these become completely obsolete. Getting back to the original thread starter: as Joe C already said, stylesheet switchers and similar solutions are the way to go, for sure. Again, let's not dumb everything down to the lowest common denominator, but work on solutions that degrade gracefully. Patrick
Received on Saturday, 27 December 2003 08:40:57 UTC