RE: Separate, but equal ?

These are good questions and they should be answered.  In my experience,
very little good information can be gotten off of the various blindness
related mailing lists.  Just email the companies directly.  Mostly the
technical support staff monitor the mailing lists, not their developers.

However, this exact issue was discussed in detail at one of the face to face
meetings.  A particular concern was that the "native" implementation would
be too generic and not serve the particular needs of any sub-set of users.

This leads to the discussion that as a whole, there isn't much need to
unroll or linearize tables VISUALLY on the screen.  Very few users require
that.

Accessibility aid vendors can currently get the information about the table
structure and use it.  Only one vendor "forces" unrolling by modifying the
object model.  Several other vendors use the object model (in this case,
Active Accessibility) to discover the structure of the table and provide
navigation.


-----Original Message-----
From: Scott Luebking [mailto:phoenixl@netcom.com]
Sent: Tuesday, February 02, 1999 1:03 PM
To: w3c-wai-ua@w3.org
Subject: Separate, but equal ?


Hi,
I've been thinking about the table issue and am not at all comfortable
with the proposal that access to tables will be provided by the
access technology without the access technology developers
agreeing to the approach.  In a way, what is being proposed is that
access technology will also need to include certain aspects of
browser technology.  Do access technology developers really want to do that
or are they being forced into it to compensate for the limitations
resulting from various browser developers' refusal to provide appropriate
direct access in the software being developed?

I'm considering posting a note to some blind-related mailing lists
which the various access developers read and get their opinions
on this issue.  If most of the access technology developers do want to
also develop browser technology, then I probably won't have a problem
with what is being proposed.

Scott

Received on Tuesday, 2 February 1999 21:04:20 UTC