Re: Legal Precedent Set for Web Accessibility

> easily insuring immediate better accessibility, *IF* one is, again, 
> invested enough in a project to do the finger work it takes to learn the 
> same (from any number of *f_r_e_e* resources available online no less)..

There are are also a lot of tools out there that pretend that you don't
need to understand HTML.  Many authors may think they have done all
the research they need when they find such a tool.  I'm looking at the
result of one of them now, although I don't know if it is free, and it is
probably not used by larger businesses.   (The site is that of a smallish,
minority (in a regional context) language teaching, charity school.)

Not having read the tool documentation, I'm not 100% sure that the
failings are not due to deliberate actions by the author, but I strongly
suspect that they are not.

This tool, iWeb 1.1.1, is generating "XHTML" that essentially only
consists of div, img and a elements (maybe one or two span's).  There are
many <div class="paragraph"> elements!  Most elements are styled with
inline style attributes and all sizes seem to be in px.  Rollover menus
are implemented as two different background images, on two absolutely
positioned div's, overlaid with an a element forced to display:block,
and also absolute (i.e. there is no link text and not even a link image;
there is no foreground anywhere in the menu!).  The home page redirects
using meta-refresh-0, with no content on the redirecting page.

In this case, I think it will actually validate (the tool ensures
well-formedness and sticks alt="" on all foreground images), but
semantically it is completely broken.

I am fairly sure the authors think they have created a flashy web site, but
it's actually very flakey in an old Mozilla and the navigation menu isn't
there at all in Lynx (one has to use Lynx's ability to find hidden links
to get off the home page).  (They didn't respond to comments about
things that are visibly broken even in IE (wrong gamma images) on a previous
version, so I don't think they'd take any notice about defects that are
not visible to them in IE.)

Basically people can generate very bad HTML that they think is very 
good "HTML" by using the tools that are available to them.

Received on Sunday, 10 September 2006 15:11:30 UTC