Re: HTML 3.2: SGML Document Access (SDA)

> I think that most authors of HTML documents would prefer that their
> documents be available to a broad audience. Notwithstanding the few large
> corporate sites which have gone to considerable extents to present barriers
> to visually challenged individuals (such as large blocks of text presented
> only within GIF files), most information providers would benefit from a
> low-effort way to make "reasonable accommodations" toward being barrier-free
> to as many folks as practical.

We have worked hard to look after the needs of a broad range of users.
Style sheets are expected reduce the tendency for tag-abuse by giving
authors a more direct way to get the visual effects they desire. Work
on downloadable and antialias fonts should solve some of the problems
you allude to. We have even been looking at how CSS can be extended to
support voice o/p.

Imagemaps are a further problem for the gui-impaired user. The <OBJECT>
spec remedies this with a mechanism for client-side imagemaps that
is backwards compatible with all existing browsers, and represents a
major step forward in making HTML documents accessible to a broader
audience.  See  http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/WD-object.html

As a result of the strong support for CSS and for <OBJECT> we expect to
see deployment of these features by later this year.

-- Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> tel: +1 (617) 258 5741 fax: +1 (617) 258 5999
   World Wide Web Consortium, 545 Technology Square, Cambridge, MA 02139
   url = http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett

Received on Tuesday, 21 May 1996 17:16:15 UTC