css, abandoned?

All,

I am actually drawing some text from a different thread as it
helps demonstrate the nature of my question, in a fun way.

On 17 Aug, 2011  jon avila wrote: 
Would you expect that websites should be accessible with a
Commodore 64 8-bit computer?

ahem, well why not? you can buy a new one so...

Commodore 64 is back from the dead
http://www.thinq.co.uk/2010/8/27/commodore-64-returns/

I could not resist sharing that.  someone went through a great
deal of trouble to bring those back to the marketplace.  People
go through a great deal of trouble to keep lynx under
development, with a new edition due out any day now.  Projects
like enhanced dr dos, freedos and the like feed dos too. I even
understand there is a structure of  dos under windows 7.  all
this effort is there for a reason, there is a users market.

You say further:

People have to start somewhere with accessibility.  We all have a
limited amount of time and want to serve the widest audience
including as many people with disabilities.  Given that there are
plenty of free open source browsers that are supported that
(major browsers) is a logical place to start.

Accept that when you shift things to a browser focus, support for
those free browsers go out the window.  Companies start to claim
that they need not support any but the major, and access,
including text friendly script based access gets abandoned.  I am
facing this situation now...again I might add, with an American
financial institution who got wind that they need not support all
browsers according to the w3c.  So even the script based text
browsers that were workable before are banned...because they are
now seen as a security risk.  We all know of course that Internet
Explorer is the most secure browser known to man.

Yes there is a css question here.  Has this concept been
abandoned all together?  I ask because my understanding has been
that creating a cascading style sheet removed the need for much
debate about what a person was driving on the Internet super
highway. I have explained when talking to site developers that if
the company wanted a person driving a 57 Chevy to reach their
storefront, the concrete forming the road  would be solid.  I see
css as the same thing.  It lets a person choose the tool that
works best for them and lets them in the door.  The approach as I
understood it, still allows site developers to create whatever
extra sheets they wanted, but if I preferred doing my bank
business using a secure script / text friendly browser I could. 
so could people using lynx the cat  and others on their older
cellphones etc. 
The comment above though opens the door for site developers to
dump access all together based on a false security claim.

Is the css concept gone from accessibility guidelines?  if not,
can someone send me something to document it?

Of course the other side of the "given" in the above assumption
is that since the free browsers  are out there and supported,
they run themselves.  Someone else noted in the same thread that
the challenge is letting people know about all the new options
etc.  At the same time, knowledge does not equal available. Many
of you, I even say most of you are able to program your way to a
solution.  It is fair to point out that a significant percentage
of the disabled community should not be measured at your level. 
Just like the rest of the human family, they stick with what they
know and what works especially when talking about a machine. The
days of hands on training in a person's private home with someone 
beside them are practically gone. Many use the tools they learned
from those days, on the equipment they have and can maintain. 
Yes there are many many lynx users out there, but given the
social manhandling some may get if they share as much, you think
it is going to show up in a survey?  No Lynx does not work for
every task, that is why links <the chain> and e-links the text
based script friendly browsers are there, even included in major
Linux distributions.  But if you allow developers to hear the
expression just work on the most popular, remembering that for
many the entire concept of accessibility is like a foreign
tongue, and you create a trend that             excludes  many
and allows the guidelines to be ignored, assuming css is still
there.

Is it?

Karen

Received on Friday, 9 September 2011 04:27:15 UTC