RE: UA ISSUE OF THE WEEK: Table element access

<<
There will also be "main stream" user agents that will be using non-visual
rendering of HTML information.  Richard Premack attended one of the
telecons last month and was part of a company deeloping an auditory browser
for telephone and portable user agent technologies.  He was interested in
how to make their product more accessible.  
>>

We can find problems under every rock we turn over.  Let's solve the problem
that people have - which is access to the internet.

Why do they have this problem?  Because pages are badly written, the
authoring tools do not help, and the major browsers - Netscape and IE, still
have accessibility problems.

No one is complaining about the accessibility of an aural browser.  

pwWebSpeak is a very good attempt at *fixing* the problem - it's not part of
the problem itself.

<<
You are probably specifically concerned about Internet Explorer.  In the
case enlargement, speech or Braille renderings IE could say it does not
apply or preferably that they provide an interface for other technologies
to provide these features.   
>>

Absolutely I'm concerned about IE, but I feel I can be objective and say
that IE and Netscape represent the biggest problems that users have.  

As far as providing an interface for other technologies - what's wrong with
that?  That's a perfectly acceptable piece of the solution puzzle.  In some
cases, such as keyboard access, the access should be built in.

I feel very strongly that the UA group needs to define *and* limit the scope
of the first release of the guidelines to IE and Netscape.  I think there is
no shame in being specific.  They are the ones that have caused part of the
problem that users have and should be responsible for fixing their part of
it.

Include all the other browsers in future revisions.  CSS expanded it scope
to different types of media types it's second revision - why can't these
guidelines?

Received on Wednesday, 13 January 1999 19:17:19 UTC