Graham Cook wrote:
Having been in your position for some time until recently (I was standards
manager for Telstra), I found that the best way to achieve change toward
accessibility was to meet with the stakeholders and either take a
transcript, or play directly a Jaws readout of a page that had been sliced
and diced into tables, especially if non-semantic markup is also
incorporated. Their reaction is often one of horror when they realize how
incomprehensible their page becomes. If they need further convincing, just
ask them how to find one or two of the most visually obvious items within
the Jaws rendition.
At a WSG meeting in Wellington, earlier in the year (see
http://www.gooduse.co.nz/thegoodnessarchives/000113.html), Jonathon
Mosen did a live demo of JAWS to an audience of web developers. Watching
the light bulbs go on as it read out an interminable database URL from
an Amazon.com link was almost funny - you could see the ones who were
thinking "but *we* produce databases like that!"
IMHO semantic mark-up is a big chunk of accessibility but it is only
part of the battle. A carefully planned information architecture is
equally important - it needs to allow concise, persistent navigation,
even for transient information.
As others have said, accessibility isn't just about blind people. An
associate, legally blind but still able to see somewhat, uses IE as her
browser, without assistive technology. She needs high contrast text and
easily identified links. A text-based alternative won't cut it for her.
At a seminar last year, someone raised the point of dyslexics, who have
as much trouble with text-based alternatives as they do with the
original text-heavy page. I still haven't got my head around a solution
for that.
People with poor mobility, people with reduced cognitive capability,
colour-blind people - accessibility is about all these.
And then there's the technologically challenged - those who don't live
near a major city and are doomed to dial-up, and degraded dial-up at
that. Oz is like NZ in that the telephone lines in rural areas have to
traverse a lot of electric fences and that causes problems for the signal.
I don't know if this can all be solved simply by guerilla mark-up - I
rather believe that it has to start in base design of content, and that
goes back to the productivity templates, not usually within the
web-geek's purview. And that means corporate change.
By all means, code to standards without direct instruction - as a
professional, you should do the best job you can, not the minimum the
client requires. And the consensus around here is that standards-based
design is the best way, else why are we reading this?
But also work to increase corporate understanding of the business
advantages around standards-based design - refer them to NUblog's [*]
excellent summary of the 2000 SOCOG complaint
(http://www.contenu.nu/socog.html) or or point them at Joe Clark's page
(http://www.joeclark.org/accessiblog/ab-lawsuits.html [**]) of suit
references as examples. The accessibility lawsuit is coming to a court
near you in the future. Convince your manager not to be a test case.
Cheers
Mark Harris
[*] also one of Jo Clark's, I notice
[**] although I'm a little concerned about the goatse-like cover of his
book...
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