RE: UA ISSUE OF THE WEEK: Table element access

In response to Charles Oppermann,
I do not see anything wrong with user agents like IE or Navigator providing
APIs for other (assistive) technoloiges.  Personally, I think that the
fastest way to improve accessibility of the WWW for people with blindness
is to help assistive technology developers understand interfaces like the
DOM to provide alternative user interfaces to the information.   Wilson
Craig of Henter-Joyce is very excited about the possibility and we are
trying to schedule workshops at ATIA events for assistive technology
developers this summer and in the fall. 
 
Would you or other people at Microsoft be interested in helping with these
workshops?

But I feel the guidelines should reflect what the user needs.  Mainstrean
browsers that do not provide a checkpoint feature natively could provide an
interface to allow an assistive technology to provide the checkpoint and
that would be an available response to a particular checkpoint available to
a developer.

Jon



At 04:17 PM 1/13/99 -0800, Charles (Chuck) Oppermann wrote:
><<
>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?
> 
Jon Gunderson, Ph.D., ATP
Coordinator of Assistive Communication and Information Technology
Division of Rehabilitation - Education Services
University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign
1207 S. Oak Street
Champaign, IL 61820

Voice: 217-244-5870
Fax: 217-333-0248
E-mail: jongund@uiuc.edu
WWW:	http://www.staff.uiuc.edu/~jongund
	http://www.als.uiuc.edu/InfoTechAccess

Received on Thursday, 14 January 1999 17:50:50 UTC