- From: Charles (Chuck) Oppermann <chuckop@MICROSOFT.com>
- Date: Sat, 3 Oct 1998 18:47:42 -0700
- To: Harvey Bingham <hbingham@ACM.org>, w3c-wai-ua@w3.org
<< [Would a screen reader trigger the exposing of layers?] >> Why should it? All the content of the page (it's still just a HTML page) is available programmatically. I was using beta version of a screen reader with a beta version of Internet Explorer on that site and it was having little problems with the page. That's the power of Active Accessibility - you can stop trying to dumb down the display when you smarten the flow of information to the accessibility aid. << Much too much visual cotton candy for my taste. Very little hard content in the early pages. The message is the movement. A second browser appeared. Motion for motion sake, hardly for message sake, distracts. I believe little of what was there serves any purpose worth annotating! >> While I agree with some of that - don't forget that everyday people create web sites that are even worse content wise. This reminds me of what people said about MTV in 1982. Someone else's garbage is another's art. << If Alt text were used, it would need to move with the objects. Try to guess where the cursor should go to invoke any alt text on it, or leave the cursor in one place and hear whatever alt text were attached to whatever passes over it! >> You're thinking with your eyes. If the information is available programmatically, it doesn't make sense to attempt to display it on the screen. << [By the way, should Ctrl-F find content in ALT text at a user option?] >> I agree that it should, but in IE4 it currently does not. I have suggested it as a guideline. Also to restrict find to just anchor text. << I should have tried to resize the full-screen window. I leave that to someone else, I've had enough of that page set. >> Don't give up, pages like that are the wave of the future. A lot of user interface design is being done with DHTML. You can see it in many places. A very good example is Outlook 98. The "Organize..." and "Find..." features are implemented using DHTML. It's keyboard accessible and by using CSS, can track the system colors. I often wonder what web people are surfing sometimes when I attend WAI meetings. They talk about documents and headers and such. In my job, I use and review pages that have no header elements and can be made to look exactly like Windows dialogs. I bet many of you haven't noticed that the Find dialog in IE4 is actually a HTML window. Using ACCESSKEY and LABEL and CSS coloring, it looks and acts exactly like a regular Windows dialog. (Aside: Someone here recently decried "Microsoft's practice of propriety extensions" - as if that was a bad thing. Some of those "extensions" are ACCESSKEY, LABEL and CSS attribute values for system cursors and colors that enable greater accessibility to HTML user interfaces.) We should not be worrying about HTML *documents*, they are relatively easy to access. The real problems are with HTML *applications*. That is what's fueling the interest in and use of CGI, Perl, JavaScript, Java applets, VBScript, Dynamic HTML and DOM. Charles Oppermann Program Manager, Accessibility and Disabilities Group, Microsoft Corporation mailto:chuckop@microsoft.com http://microsoft.com/enable/ "A computer on every desk and in every home, usable by everyone!"
Received on Saturday, 3 October 1998 21:47:44 UTC