- From: David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
- Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 10:05:54 +0100 (BST)
- To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Apologies for replying to myself, but further developments, I think, help to highlight the designer psychology that results in poor accessibility. > Looking at another page <http://www.rowan-cottage.co.uk/Site/Articles.html> > which praises this tool as an easy way to create web pages, it doesn't > even guarantee well-formedness, at least when people start using scripting. I got a rather interesting, but hostile ("I didn't ask for criticism" - although he did ask for people to register appreciation), response to a criticism sent to the webmaster. The main point he picked on was that it wouldn't validate (I had said that it was not well formed and explained the consequences for true XHTML browsers). He used the fact that essentially all major sites don't validate and that his page worked on normal browsers as the counter argument. I was surprised that he was aware of validation, but the bad precedent set by major sites seems to be a big problem. This seems particularly relevant in terms of the past history of this thread. I also said that he could have got to a clickable site very simply by hand inserting a elements. His response was that, for ordinary people, this was really difficult to do. I suspect, though, that he was really talking about producing sites with all the bells and whistles of commercial sites, and that he simply wasn't prepared to produce a straightforward site. The other point he responded to wasn't explicit, but I had used Lynx and had therefore got the "needs Javascript" banner. In his view, the only people who turn off scripting are professional designers trying to deliberately break other web sites. His claim is that 99% of people have scripting always on (my impression is that the figure is somewhat lower than this). I haven't written HTML code professionally for several years; when not using Lynx, I block scripting for security reasons. He didn't react to my pointing out the lack of alt attributes, and links with no foreground content, and their implications for blind users, nor to the impact of pixel units on: high resolution displays, poor eyesight, and reflowability, nor to the use of <div class="paragraph", or style attributes. Unfortunately, I failed to mention the meta-refresh-0, with no page content, redirect, although I think it would have fallen under the category of "works on all normal browser". Although the real problem is with Apple, who are most unlikely to pay any attention to a complaint from a, non-customer, member of the public, I thing the iWeb part of this site is worth a look because it gives an idea of web designer psychology by listing the sorts of characteristics of web sites that designers consider important enough to want to work round the tools. Accessibility, of course, is not one of them.
Received on Monday, 11 September 2006 09:15:37 UTC