Richard, these are all good questions. The best thing to do as actually observe real people (with disabilities) interacting with sites.
I have watched blind users and users with severe vision impairment who become frustrated and leave sites very quickly. They are more likely to struggle on if the information is very important or only available at one particular site. When David Woodbridge's was demonstrating a poorly built site to the WSG last year he commented: "I am doing this to demonstrate the problems. In real life I would never really go this far into a site this bad, I would have left on the fist page". Think of it in other terms. If there was a shop with major physical barriers (like being forced to climb a ladder just to get into the shop), and the shop keeper was never available, would you hang around long? Compare that to a shop nearby with easy access and friendly staff. Russ > Are users really *that* impatient? Does the physically disabled site user > not even bother to see if the content on the page is worth-while? As a > developer who believes in validation, would you not bother looking at a page > if you you didn't see a little xhtml link at the bottom? > > Should we bother to build site for people who don't bother to use them? > > Just a thought... > > And a reminder that we're after best practice within the contrainsts > provided by the project and the technology, not a rigid, total and utter > compliancy to every living mammal on the planet. > > R ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
