Hi Gary
> While I fully accept the need to make sites accessible to the widest > audience of people, where is the balance? Sometimes you don't need it to be accessible to a wide audience - an admin system for a select group of users within an organisation for example. In these cases bells & whistles & DHTML and the rest can be very practical. On the other hand a form or table designed for a government funded & publicly available site is a whole different story. The other night at the Sydney Web Standards Group meeting we had Roger Husdon from Web Usability demo some different HTML run through a screen reader. The two demo's that impressed me were the form example and the complex table example. The difference made by adding some accessibility tags & attributes was huge. Things like <caption>, <th> and headers="... for tables and <fieldset>, <legend> and <label> for forms. These all have benefits in visual browsers too, but support is a little flaky in some. The problem James was flagging in his example was that there are two separate tables there - one displaying the static header and the other displaying the scrolling rows. So there's no real way to associate the headers with the rows. In an admin system where you know there are only 12 users who are all on XP IE6 this isn't really and issue. > Do we then sacrifice that "accessibility" for an alternative? > Do we look > at doing two (or three or four or....) separate sites? Duplicate content with different MIME types - yes (see the proposed use of <object> in XHTML). But I don't see creating multiple sites with duplicate sites being the answer at all. No matter what approach you take there will be sacrifices but I think you can generally get a good balance if you put some thought and effort in. The real challenge in convincing clients and other people involved in a project that some of the more bleeding edge DHTML and the like is not so clever. "But Competitor X is doing it...." > What aspects of Cold Fusion can help us to reduce the coding burden, but > increase the "accessibilty" for everyone ? Something I noticed in blogmx at benorama.com. I haven't put it in practice yet & its completely untested but may help. <!--- This file is /system/cftags/form/inputText.cfm ---> <cfparam name="inputId" type="string"> <cfparam name="inputLabel" type="string"> <cfparam name="maxlength" default="255" type="numeric"> <cfparam name="size" default="40" type="numeric"> <cfoutput> <p><label for="#inputId#">#inputLabel#</label><br> <input type="text" name="#inputId#" id="#inputId#" maxlength="#maxlength#" size="#40#"></p> </cfoutput> <!--- This file is /myForm.cfm ---> <cfimport prefix="input" taglib="/system/cftags/form"> <form:inputText inputId="Fname" inputLabel="First Name"> <form:inputText inputId="Sname" inputLabel="Surname"> <form:inputText inputId="PhoneHome" inputLabel="Home Phone Number"> <form:inputText inputId="PhoneWork" inputLabel="Work Phone Number"> <form:inputText inputId="PhoneMobile" inputLabel="Mobile Phone Number"> Not complete or tested, but you should be able to see where thats going. Outside of Coldfusion - I suggest you design your html (especially forms and tables) without any regard for how they look. Just think about marking them up in a logical & accessible way. You'll end up with a plain vanilla black & white page. From there start messing with CSS to get it looking right. You'll probably need to do some minor hacks & tweaks to your html for cosmetic reasons but you're underlying structure will good. Some links worth checking out: http://www.csszengarden.com - proper html mark-up + lots of nice css designs. http://www.diveintoaccessibility.org - my favourite accessibility book (free online). http://sydney.webstandardsgroup.org - you don't have to be in Sydney to benefit from the list. Cheers Mark ______________ Mark Stanton Web Production Gruden Pty Ltd Tel: 9956 6388 Mob: 0410 458 201 Fax: 9956 8433 www.gruden.com --- You are currently subscribed to cfaussie as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] MX Downunder AsiaPac DevCon - http://mxdu.com/
