> We're doing a tender for a client that has requested a text-only > version of the site, for accessibility reasons. Now, *I* know that > that's ridiculous and text-only is not an acceptable alternative to an > accessible site, but I need some good verbage/references to explain > that (and what we propose instead) but I'm kinda lost for the right > words. > Does anyone know of a good online article/resource to help me out? > Something specific to Australian legislation would be fantastic.
There's nothing inherently wrong with providing a text only alternative (if there was, we'd have to outlaw alternative stylesheets too). The problem generally comes from that version missing content or getting out of date; plus the human problem of getting lazy on the default site thinking the text site will bail you out. Text sites are ok if they are generated automatically (so they don't get out of date) and the original site doesn't bury everything in Flash or something. In the long run, alternative stylesheets should replace them. If you can't auto-generate the text site, then you can probably defeat the idea based on doubling maintenance costs for the entire life of the site. The ROI on a compliant site with graceful degradation should come out to be far higher than trying to maintain the entire site twice over. I'm not sure that I've seen much online on the topic, though. So I guess this didn't really help, sorry :( h -- --- <http://www.200ok.com.au/> --- The future has arrived; it's just not --- evenly distributed. - William Gibson ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
