Re: Dutch ministerial decision on accessibility of government websites

Hi,

At 23:15 8/03/2007, Christopher Hoffman wrote:

>On 3/7/07, Christophe Strobbe <christophe.strobbe@esat.kuleuven.be> wrote:
>
>>I'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned in this list: on 1 September
>>2006, the Dutch minister of the Interior and Kingdom Relations
>>published a "ministerial decision" on the quality of the national
>>government's websites.
>>A few hightlights:
>>
>>7.3: don't use d-links.
>>8.21: serve files with the appropriate MIME type.
>>[People have argued that this rules out XHTML 1.0 because it's MIME
>>type is not supported by a dominant browser.]
>
>Neither is the longdesc attribute, which is the proposed alternative
>to using d-links.

I don't think you can compare lacking support for "application/xhtml+xml"
with lacking support for the longdesc attribute.
Browsers don't open a "Save as..." dialogue when there is an attribute
they don't support, and screen readers have started to support the
longdesc attribute (JAWS, IBM Home Page Reader, Window-Eyes, and maybe
others).

Best regards,

Christophe


-- 
Christophe Strobbe
K.U.Leuven - Departement of Electrical Engineering - Research Group 
on Document Architectures
Kasteelpark Arenberg 10 - 3001 Leuven-Heverlee - BELGIUM
tel: +32 16 32 85 51
http://www.docarch.be/ 


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Received on Friday, 9 March 2007 12:18:25 UTC