Re: content: url() is bad

> Why? Assuming pages are written using semantic markup, it doesn't matter
> that authors don't write stylesheets.

Real world authors don't write with semantic markup (in my view most real
world authors really should not be using a semantic markup language[1]).
The business model behind assistive technology is to allow employers to
buy their way out of disability discrimination legislation penalties by
allowing their visually impaired employees to access the internal and
external web sites needed to do their job.  To fit that market niche, the
AT needs to work with real world web sites, which are basically
presentational hacks.  Lynx and a true screen readers works reasonably
well on truly semantic sites, but there is no money in that.

The difference between the leading AT products and screen readers is
that the AT products take lots of hints from the DOM and MSAA hooks,
in order to try and make some sense out of real world sites, whereas
a screen reader will simply read what is on the screen of a text mode
browser.

[1] I can say a lot more on that!

Received on Tuesday, 13 April 2004 16:31:46 UTC