RE: User Testing of Accessiblity Features

With deference to Joe, pardon the top post.

Raman, 

Thank you for your eloquent words, especially in reference to "what was/is"
[#2 & #3 below].

If you missed Raman's posting, please do read it

JF


T.V Raman wrote:
> Not quite sure what you were looking for with respect to my comments
> on 
> http://joeclark.org/book/sashay/serialization/Chapter11.html
> 
> But here are a few.
> 
> 0) It's a mistake to pigeon-hole Aural CSS as assistive/adaptive
>     technology -- it's a media-specific style technology for a
>     media that is waiting to happen on the Web at some
>     point. (where some point == when we're all tired of clicking
>     on flashing pictures)
> 
> 1) Note the points that Joe recorded faithfuly in his article
>     with respect to what I said about using class values
>     intelligently as an author, and not worrying at authoring
>     time about how it might get used (today you'd call that
>     microformats).
> 
> 2) The biggest risk with respect to accessibility is to define
>     tomorrow's authoring solutions based on yesterday's access
>     technology. The reason this is a downward death-spiral is
>     that today's access technologies were written yesterday to
>     work the content that was created the day-before-yesterday.
> 
> 3) So: break the vicious circle, write clean content, use
>     meaningful markup, and intelligent software that leverages
>     your content in ways you never imagined will "emerge" -- that
>     in fact is the secret to the success of the Web. Arguments of
>     the form "no tool uses X", therefore "drop X" and "people did
>     Y yesterday, so bless it as the one and only solution for
>     tomorrow" typically lead to the death-spiral sketched out
>     above.
> 
> 
> 4)  Taking the sum total of the above, Accessibility contrary to
>     common belief is actually extremely easy to do if done right.
> Easy:
> 
> A)      You dont need to go test your content with one or other
>         access tool. But then in a Web that stuck to its original
>         design goals, you wouldn't need to test your content in
>         different browsers either.
> 
> B) As authors, make sure you *always* own your content in the
>         sense that your content never becomes the slave of some
>         authoring tool that purports to "make your life
>         easy". They usually dont, and only make your life more
>         difficult down the line.
> 
> C) I myself came to XML/XHTML from the world of LaTeX, and *all*
>         my notes from graduate school that I wrote in LaTeX are
>         still usable and machine-processable.
>         Having moved from LaTeX to XHTML for a while, I now find
>         myself mostly creating content in:
>         0) LaTeXfor high-quality print output
>         1) Emacs/org-mode http://orgmode.org for pretty much
>         everything else
> 
>         And generate XHTML when needed for the Web --
>         Using tex4ht for LaTeX and Emacs/org-mode export
>         facilities for the rest.
>         D) And for intelligent uses of class values see these
>         sections of the online Emacspeak documentation:
>         WebSearch:
>        
>        
>        
>
http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/info/html/emacspeak_002dwebsearch.html#emac
speak_002dwebsearch
> URL Templates:
>
http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/info/html/emacspeak_002durl_002dtemplate.ht
ml#emacspeak_002durl_002dtemplate
> 
>         E) And in a final interesting twist on leveraging class
>         values,a few years ago if you told HTML authors to put
>         unique id values on containers, they would flatly
>         refuse. But any time you AJAX-enable your site with
>         JavaScript handlers, those handlers need to address
>         portions of the page, and authors end up putting unique
>         ids. As an example, see the "CNN Content" URL template in
>         the Emacspeak codebase.
> 
> 
> Hope you found this a good read, it's Friday afternoon which is
>         probably why I got philosophical.

Received on Friday, 31 August 2007 23:31:42 UTC