On Fri, 21 Jun 2002, Dennis Eberl wrote: > The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), which I have been reading and which > I believe came out of W3C, strikes me as naive and ineffective. The real > hope, as I see it, is XML/XSL. By separating content from formate in a > rigorous way, one can for a web site, you obviously make it possible to > play that info out in whatever way best fits a handicapped person.
XML is only one part of the puzzle though, the real gains come with the embedding of semantics into publicly available information. So you could for instance request the address of your doctor's office and extract just the chunk of text that defines the address from your doctor's website. XML/XSLT are the building blocks on which this type of semantic encoding is going to be built, but there are a lot of other pieces that come into play. > > Since in the real world (i.e., where most of us live, right?), people who > design web pages barely have the funding and time or page design and > written language skills to properly create a web site for someone with no > visual, auditory, or cognitive impairments, there is _no_ hope they will > get around to even trying to follow the WAI guidelines. At some point the advantages of moving to a semantically enabled content model will be so obvious that it will be economically feasible for someone to automate the process for legacy content; whether that someone is the content providers/owners or the search engines, the browsers, or some other group yet to emerge is still up in the air. > As XML becomes more and more accessible and more an more used, it is my > hope that one could create on the client side a browser that is adapted to > a handicapped person's special needs. I believe this is a more realistic > approach (i.e., a browser plug in). My special interest is in the needs of > those who are totally blind. Have you made contact with Mobility International?
