Re: @title's relation to accessibility

On 9/3/07, Sander Tekelenburg <st@isoc.nl> wrote:
>
> Ah, thanks. Yes, I can see how such use of @title can be helpful in some
> browsing situations. But personally I would think such markup can be useful
> for all browsing situations, not just for "accessibility".

Using proper, meaningful markup in a way that is useful for all
browsing situations is the definition of "accessibility".

Remember that "accessibility" doesn't just mean "readable to blind people".

Accessibility means accessibility to ALL browsing situations:
- blind people with aural browsers
- blind people with braille UAs
- deaf people
- sighted people with low vision
- well-abled people with a non-graphical UA
- well-abled people with outdated graphical UAs
- well-abled people with outdated hardware and/or slow connections
- well-abled people with modern graphical UAs
- well-abled people without proprietary plugins
- non-humans attempting to make sense of a document (spiders)
- people who speak a language other than the author's primary language

I'm sure there are other facets that fall under the term "accessibility"

If say that @title exists to make content more meaningful in certain
situations or all situations, then yes, it has something to do with
accessibility.  Beyond that, I don't know what point you're trying to
make in this thread (maybe you're using a more specific definition of
the word "accessibility"?)

As a counter-example, I could write a page that uses nothing but <div>
and <span> elements.  It could look *great* on a graphical UAs and on
paper.  It could make perfect sense to a blind user with an aural UA.
But is that the best I can do for accessibility?  No - the document
might be unusable on Netscape 4 or in Lynx, and a spider would have a
hard time finding any meaning in the document.

-- 
Jon Barnett

Received on Monday, 3 September 2007 19:19:16 UTC