Joe Clark's Answers -- In Valid XHTML

We sent 10 of your questions to usability guy Joe Clark, and he took it upon himself to go a bit beyond simply answering them. In his reply he said, "Answers attached in a valid XHTML file. I would suggest at least retaining the id attributes. I copy-edited all the questions, but the words are all the same; they are now merely spelled and capitalized correctly. I think all the links work." Whatever. We left Joe's formatting intact. It's a little different from our usual style, but variety is the spice of Slashdot. Ask the Expert: Accessibility 1) How far should it go?

by newsdee

Macromedia Flash has integrated many accessibility features in an effort to promote development of content for special needs. However, can we realistically try to turn any multimedia feature into its accessible equivalent? Is it even feasible other than providing a text-only equivalent?

There seems to be a stereotyped understanding of Flash content at work here. Flashturbation is not the only usage of that authoring tool.

I believe the question really intends to ask Are artistic uses of Flash, like Josh Daviss Praystation, really amenable to accessibility? The answer is a qualified yes, and I say that because Praystation-like Flash experimentation is essentially a form of cinema that merely uses the Web as a delivery mechanism. Cinematic experiments of this sort are indisputably a different species from other forms of Flash development.

In that example, the solution is to treat the Flash objects as a movie and apply standard movie accessibility features, namely captioning and audio description. Im not one of those people who believes that abstract, experimental, or non-narrative cinema cannot be captioned and described lots of music videos fall into that category, and theyve been captioned for nearly 15 years. (Description of experimental audiovisual artworks has not really been attempted to my knowledge, but description of abstract art in museums and of non-narrative plays and dance performances in theatres have all been going on for years. Its perfectly possible.)

The challenges, then, are two: Infrastructure and interface. There isnt really a very good way of including captions or descriptions in a Flash file as yet (an infrastructure problem). Macromedia knows all about this (Ive discussed it with them at length, and also written about it), and it will eventually be fixed. (Even finding an example of Flash with captioning is difficult today. Youd think Id have a complete list at the tip of my fingers, but I dont. The Macromedia Contribute feature tour is one case.) I dont know of any Flash animation that was ever described.

The interface problem is: How does the viewer turn captions and descriptions on and off? This isnt like a TV set, where you can manipulate onscreen menus (and how do you manage that if youre blind?) to turn captions and/or descriptions on and off. Browsers are not smart enough to automatically turn access features on and off, though I think a future upgrade of one file format that shall remain nameless will be the first to include such a capacity. At any rate, this may be one of the rare cases where an overt visual change must be made to accommodate accessibility actual selectable buttons to turn CC and DX on and off. (The buttons themselves have to be accessible, i.e., part of the tabbing order and with alternate texts and so forth.)

Now, lets consider other examples of Flash.

Banner ads the really big skyscraper ads that bug your arse on so many sites The usual Flash accessibility features can be used, and you can be smart and include the Flash object inside, say, an iframe element, which provides vast options for accessibility. (You can add a long description to the iframe, though thats questionably useful, and include alternate content in case the main content cannot be loaded, which could be an ordinary animated GIF or still image with alt and title.) Comics Flash-based comics can be relatively straightforward to make accessible (Apocamon doesnt seem too tricky its essentially a panel-based comic strip with a wee bit of animation) or could require full-on cinematic techniques, as with Broken Saints. User interfaces Flash can be and is used as a tidier means of providing a user interface, as at FoxSports.com or in the Neuros audio-player demo. The temptation, as in that last example, is also to use motion graphics and audio, which may require the same CC and DX as before, but many user interface can be made adequately accessible with todays Flash accessibility tools (text equivalents, making objects visible or invisible in the document structure, etc.). Manipulable objects Games (including the Royal National Institute for the Blinds ill-advised consciousness-raising game, no longer online) and even some interfaces (like History of Health Care) may include objects youre intended to grab and manipulate with the mouse. The current Flash accessibility tools are not really up to the challenge of adding keyboard equivalents for such manipulable objects. You could hack it together yourself, but there are no built-in commands or primitives you could use in a standards-compliant way. Intros Skippable intros are just as awful today as the day they were invented. Unfortunately, we cant make value judgements about which information should and should not be made accessible. Even skippable intros have to be made accessible, either by treating them as cinema or simply giving them a few text equivalents. The skip-intro link has to be selectable by keyboard, of course. Tools These interfaces let you do something. One I like a lot, if only because I am a typography queen, is Jeremy Tankards font viewer, though it is admittedly overkill because other font-viewing miniprograms do not require Flash. It may be possible to make the inputs to such tools accessible (you can place the cursor in the right place, operate controls, and so forth), but the results might be intrinsically inaccessible. (Note that artists portfolio sites, font and clip-art vendors, stock-photo houses, and other sites that sell visual imagery using ordinary HTML can be made passably accessible even to a blind person. In the Tankard case, perhaps only the name of the font and the text entered would be rendered to a screen reader or other device.) E-commerce Perhaps the most credible Flash instance, E-commerce sites like Ted Baker (see its Footwear store) may include all the features of the other instances Ive listed here. Since E-commerce is a convenient way to shop for many disabled people, I would strongly emphasize the need for accessibility. But it might be stretching the limits of current Flash access tools, since you have to make an interface, product shots and other images, and text all accessible. Thats not difficult in HTML, but I dont have any examples to point to of accessible Flash-based E-commerce sites that we could use as a comparison; I dont know how hard it would be to make such sites accessible. Aside: The most sophisticated Flash site Ive ever seen is DirtyBastards.com. (No direct hyperlink; consider this the strongest possible warning of adult content. Be very sure you want to look at it.) The usability could use an update, but in general its astounding. Should we ever be in the same city, Ill take anyone who can update that site for accessibility to dinner at the restaurant of their choice.

I would add a proviso here. Accessibility does not relate solely to blind people. As mentioned above, any quasi-cinematic work with audio requires captioning; deaf people need accessibility, too. There is much more attention being paid now to the Web-accessibility needs of people with learning disabilities (the most famous of which is dyslexia), which well get to later.

Learning-disabled people are by far the hardest to accommodate online, and for many HTML pages, they are probably impossible to accommodate in any really helpful way. Flash animations could be a good solution for that group because you can build in many levels of information, use audio and graphics, and provide really good controls for pacing (because having too much information coming at you all at once is a barrier for many people). Inevitably, accessible Flash in that context would limit itself to custom-engineered animations specifically made for that audience; I doubt that general uses of Flash will be upgraded for that kind of accessibility.

Text-only sites are not the alternative to accessible sites. Text-only is not accessible. Well discuss graphic sophistication later.

Biggest problem

by robbo

What, in your opinion, is the most common complaint concerning accessibility and Web sites? In other words, if in the interests of accessibility you could encourage site owners to change only one thing about how they operate, what would it be?

Images. Seriously, if youve got an ordinary HTML Web page and you make absolutely all your images accessible including, crucially, adding alt="" to every spacer GIF and every other meaningless graphic youre four-fifths of the way to being an accessible Web site for the group with the greatest single need, the blind and visually-impaired.

I emphasize coding to standards. Unless you have an airtight reason (like youre stuck using an old content-management system you cannot afford to replace), I really dont want to have anything to do with you unless youreproducing valid HTML. Now, tiny invalidities are just that, tiny: <hr> and <hr/> really are the same thing. And Im sure that ultra-purist geeks will now launch a hypocrisy hunt and comb through my entire Web presence to locate pages with non-valid markup. (Knock yourselves out. I make small mistakes, and have not updated scores of very old pages. Im also a vegan with some shoes and accessories made of leather. Complete purity is sometimes unattainable.) In one of the many ironies of Web development, it is indie developers like me who have a higher success rate in achieving valid, accessible sites even though larger commercial operations are the ones where valid HTML and accessibility are more urgently needed.

In any event, if youre producing tag soup, as far as Im concerned youre demonstrably not all that interested in responsible Web development.

The upside? If you do write valid pages, you have to include at least an alt text for every graphic. For no extra effort (you have to do it anyway), you get basic accessibility.

Number two on the list is navigation. Left-hand and top navbars stacked with link after link are a nightmare to wade through if you have a mobility impairment that reduces your ability to use a mouse or keyboard. (Screen-reader users are not so heavily affected; they can skip entire table cells, for example. I suppose all-CSS layouts are harder to skip through. But thats not the page authors problem; its incumbent on the adaptive technology and browser to clean up their act.)

If youre able to use a mouse, you can just avoid the entire navbar. But a mobility-impaired person may be stuck tabbing from one link to another and thats the best-case scenario. Quite possibly, a mobility-impaired visitor may be using software that cycles through a set of input choices for example, the mouse; then the alphabet keys of keyboard; then the number keys; then the function keys. You may have to wait until the keyboard option cycles back again in order to type repeated keystrokes. (You may have a mental image of a sip-and-puff switch or Christopher Reeve using speech-input software. The principles are the same and so is the inconvenience.)

If you, the page designer, stack 20 or even a hundred links in a left-hand navbar and assume that people can simply tab through them, well, (a) tabbing 20 or a hundred times is something youd never expect a nondisabled person to put up with, and (b) some people will have to wait 20 or a hundred cycles of their software in order to do the equivalent of pressing the Tab key.

The solution? Put skip-navigation links on top of every navbar with, say, ten or more links. (Or fewer. Use your judgement. Section 508 regulations technically require a skip link in every navbar, even for a page footer.)

Note that skip-navigation links have to be visible; a lot of people use hyperlinked single-pixel GIFs with alt texts, but those are invisible to mobility-impaired people, most of whom have normal vision. The links dont have to be ugly or intrusive, but they have to be plainly visible and selectable. (If you want to be thorough, you can give them accesskey and tabindex values.)

Do those two things and your site becomes vastly more accessible to two large disability groups right then and there.

Accessible Slashdot?

by ictatha

How does Slashdot stack up? What about blog-type sites in general? What can be done on these types of sites to make them more accessible?

Mark Pilgrim has fully strip-mined this topic. (He also tech-edited my book and is generally formidable.)

The issue here is random vs. serial access. A nondisabled site visitor can jump around the page. If you can see, its very easy to skim the page, and it is also very easy to zip to what interests you if you can operate a mouse or keyboard well. Nondisabled people have random access to the contents of a page. Many disabled people the blind and the mobility-impaired in specific experience a Web site serially, with one item after another articulated (as in speech or Braille) or selected. The page author can make skipping around easier, and so can relevant software like screen readers, but its still going to be harder to navigate than for a nondisabled person.

Slashdot is dominated by words. The page introducing this interview carried about 6,900 words even with minimal comment expansion. The issue, then, becomes navigation, which I discussed in the previous answer. Adding hyperlinks to skip various navbars would be a good first step.

Slashdot could certainly use better semantic markup. Valid code is a must; I want Slashdot to eat my own dog food. Subject lines of postings could and should be marked up as headings (h1 through h6); font elements could be eliminated; Im not wild about table markup to achieve indention, though making structural hierarchies apparent is not easy at all (perhaps unordered lists with a style declaration of list-style-type: none might suffice). It would then be possible to navigate from heading to heading.

If youre running a more limited Weblog with just a couple of screenfuls of text at a time, then my advice is simple: Write valid code, provide a text equivalent for every image, work on navigation a bit, and youve made a big dent in the problem.

Photoblogs or those containing multimedia are, of course, more complicated, but as long as every photo has an alt text and your multimedia is captioned and described, youre doing well. It is certainly easy to add alt texts to your photos, but captioning and description are hard to do well and are technically difficult to implement. Im mentioning the multimedia case merely for completeness; I dont read any blogs that regularly post video and audio. (I suppose The Ben Brown Show was an example.)

Accessibility

by acehole

Do you think that where companies are being sued or forced into updating their Web pages at great expense to include accessibility for the blind in their Web pages when the blind could easily find another similar service offline is reasonable?

You have inadvertently stumbled across an extensive issue in disability law the question of providing equivalent or comparable access, or access that is equal in dignity to that afforded a nondisabled person.

You can draw parallels with the physical world. Think of barrier-free entrances to buildings. If the main entrance is at the centre of the buildings face but uses a staircase you cant remove, then providing a barrier-free entrance at the left side of that building would probably be considered comparable or equivalent access. But if you force a mobility-impaired person to walk through an alleyway and take a rear service elevator that is otherwise used for garbage, your accessibility probably is not comparable or equivalent. (Thats in the case of a relatively new building. A historic building or another exceptional case might permit different treatment of that sort.)

If we consider information media, theres a distinction to be drawn between old and new media, or non-electronic and electronic forms. Books are the canonical example: They cannot be made intrinsically accessible to a blind person because a book embodies a single immutable form. You have to provide accessibility elsewhere, as through a large-print edition (its a separate form), a Braille edition (also separate), or a talking book (separate yet again).

Electronic (or audiovisual) media can carry accessibility along with themselves:

• You can add closed captions and closed descriptions to a television program, DVD, online video segment, or first-run movie. (Im skipping some technical details in the movie example.)
• You can add closed captions to a videotape.
• You can add accessibility features to a Web site.

(In the first two cases, you could instead add open captions or descriptions that everyone sees or hears, but thats a very unusual practice, and by doing so you essentially create a separate work, just like publishing a large-print, Braille, or talking-book edition of a printed book.)

In all the examples above, you the viewer can activate the accessibility if you need it or ignore it if you dont. Because Web sites are electronic and can carry hidden access features, the answer to aceholes question is no, it is not reasonable to expect disabled people to go somewhere else to get the same information or enjoy the same experience.

Accordingly, yes, Southwest Airlines reservation Web site should be accessible, and no, it is not OK to expect blind people to call a telephone number when nondisabled people do not have to do so. (Read various other reasons why.)

Thats unequal treatment right there. It is not comparable or equivalent treatment, and, I argue, it impugns the dignity of a visually-impaired person who has already made a commitment to independence by using the Web with adaptive technology.

I also reject, in the strongest possible terms, the offensive and offhand claim that accessibility can be achieved at great expense. I believe the colloquial term for a claim like this is bullshit. Updating or retrofitting a site for accessibility does cost more than designing it properly in the first place, but thats true everywhere: Have you costed out adding barrier-free access to an old building vs. including it in the original designs? Retrofitting may cost more, but I deny that the expense is great. Even very extensive sites with huge swaths of multimedia can be made accessible, and it is doubtful that, given the budgets of such sites, the expense would be great.

In any event, developers always find a justification for what they like to do, whether it be Flashturbation or coding custom JavaScript features or whatever else. Its a bit late in the day, in Web-development terms, to claim that accessibility is not one of the arrows in the quiver of the competent practitioner.

Now, another of the subtexts in this question really, it is a spiders web of half-truths, barely-suppressed resentments, and ignorance suggests that the only way to achieve Web accessibility is by being sued or forced. I have consistently argued that lawsuits are the worst way to achieve accessibility, particularly in the U.S., with its poisonous atmosphere. Lawsuits merely get peoples backs up and sour the defendant on the entire concept. Defendants are forced to belittle and invalidate the concerns of people with disabilities merely in order to provide an adequate defense in the case. This is no way to run a railroad.

But lawsuits (and human-rights complaints and other actions) are still necessary from time to time. Disability law is old and tends not to expressly include the Web. (Sometimes it doesnt even include established accessibility techniques for old media, like audio description on TV.)

Its unrealistic to wait around forever for clueless lawmakers, who can barely use a cellphone let alone surf the Web, to update the legislation. To get some kind of jurisprudence on the books, lawsuits and complaints have to be filed from time to time. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesnt, but the law is a tool that must be available to everyone, including people with disabilities, whose rights have legal standing.

A competent Web developer builds accessible Web sites and does not wait to be asked to do so, let alone sued or forced.

Market for Web developers

by ragnar

Im considering a starting up a Web development firm with a focus on accessibility. I have good relations with the principals of an accessibility testing firm and believe the businesses can complement each other well. Im a part owner of a Web development firm at the moment that isnt interested in pursuing this market, but I believe there is a significant market.

Can you elaborate on the market for Web development firms that focus on accessibility? Aside from the normal perils of launching a new business (which Im fairly acquainted with), can you expound on the market need for firms that endeavor to deliver accessible content?

Deliver[ing] accessible content and starting up a Web development firm with a focus on accessibility are two different things, so lets focus on the latter.

I would say that the market for accessibility-specific Web consultancies is rather small and will have a short lifespan. I can say this with some confidence as I am an authority on accessibility, with a published book to prove it, and I hardly get any business. Even taking other factors into account, I think its the nature of the work. I have various reliable indications that other consultants arent flush with activity, either.

Why?

• Accessibility is neglected. People cant hire you to do what they never knew needed to be done anyway. Nor will they hire you to do what they resent having to do in the first place and will resist doing until their dying breath.
• Contracts are small. Even very large sites tend to be run by CMSs or templates. Once you clean those up, boom, tens of thousands of pages become accessible. There is often not a lot of billable work involved, as I know myself all too well.
• Attainable expertise. If, as I contend, accessibility is merely one of the skills a competent developer must have, eventually all the competent developers will gain that expertise. They wont need outside experts. Even if in-house access knowledge is demonstrably worse than outside consultants, there are all sorts of precedents for companies making do with barely-passable accessibility because its cheaper. There is a preference for meeting the letter of any requirements (whether self- or externally-imposed) rather than doing accessibility well.

Now, what may work massively better is, in fact, accessibility testing (and certification). It is extremely difficult and time-consuming to test site accessibility with actual disabled persons using actual adaptive technology. A firm that updates Web sites to accessibility standards, advises on how to write new sites that conform, and tests them to prove it may be a winning combination.

The issue of then certifying a site as being accessible (or meeting certain requirements) becomes a bit trickier, but Id really like to see someone give it a go. Note that any venture like this will require thoroughgoing knowledge of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, the Section 508 regs, adaptive technology, and multimedia accessibility, and that knowledge definitely includes an understanding of exceptions to the rules. I deal with too many people who literally read and literally apply whatever guideline theyve decided is gospel. Accessibility requires human judgement based on knowledge and experience. Dont set up shop without it.

What of dynamic images (charts and graphs)?

by kuwan

I see that Chapter 6 addresses the image problem which you state is a core concern in accessibility. My question is, what is your solution to data-intensive sites that display their information using graphs? For sites that have constantly changing data (stock charts, for example), what solutions/tools are there to make their graphics accessible?

The answer is that such information, in certain cases, cannot be made meaningfully accessible to a blind or visually-impaired person, or probably to a learning-disabled person. Other disability groups should be unaffected.

This, of course, leads me to my perennial complaint about the Web Accessibility Initiative and accessibility advocates generally: Theyve got no style. They have no understanding of graphic design and typography, and they project this ignorance onto the rest of the world.

To use one of my maxims, accessibility opponents think accessibility means a text-only Web site and hate the idea, while accessibility advocates also think it means a text-only site and love the idea. Theyre both wrong.

One consequence of this ignorance of visual design? The implicit claim that every illustration can be epitomized in words. You could only make this claim if you were so visually unsophisticated that you couldnt differentiate one kind of illustration from another. Of course, this is hogwash: The reason why we use illustrations is because words (or numbers) are sometimes too hard to understand by themselves.

A graph of stock performance, radar weather maps, ultrasound images any picture that is worth much more than a thousand words presents a quandary. The goal here is accessibility a disabled visitor must have equivalent access to the information conveyed by the graphic. If the underlying data is numeric, in theory you could provide the underlying data (as through the longdesc attribute of the img element just set up an HTML file, or, theoretically, a spreadsheet or a PDF, that could be loaded to describe the illustration at length).

But remember, all that numeric data was so hard to understand for nondisabled people that it was turned into a chart; now youre expecting screen-reader users to wade through those numbers one at a time? Like packing, unpacking, and repacking a suitcase, converting data to graphics and back again tends to leave something behind in the transformation.

You may have provided a text equivalent in such a case, but you have not provided accessibility.

I am not giving a carte-blanche exemption here. Many charts and graphs have one or two key points that could, in fact, be added to something as simple as an alt text: alt="Graph shows 12.2% increase in HIV seroconversion in gay males 18 to 24, 1996 to 2001". Even severely complex illustrations require at least a structural placeholder, like alt="Hubble photograph of Jupiter, its rings, and its satellites".

Its true that genuinely equal access to the information embodied in complex illustrations can be unattainable. These are exceptional cases, but they do come up.

Useful links:

• National Braille Associations recommended practices for converting illustrations into accessible forms
• PopChart by Corda attempts to automatically write long descriptions of (numerical) graphs

Deaf-blind

by gmhowell (26755)

Text-to-speech works fine for blind people (mostly). Deaf people can see most Web content. What the heck are deaf-blind people supposed to do?

One of the joys of Delphi, GEnie, Compuserve, etc. is that the discussion boards worked fine with simple telnet access, and Braille TTYs. The various Web boards that have supplanted them dont seem like they would work as well (sorry, havent tried any yet; those Braille TTYs aint cheap).

Yes, this is a personal question (see .sig).

I need help with tech solutions for the deaf-blind. Please contact me via E-mail if you have any experience in this.

Well, deaf-blind people are difficult to accommodate. Theyre also rare: Though adequate population numbers are hard to find, perhaps 11,000 deaf-blind people live in the U.S. But in some contexts, the fact that theyre deaf has no bearing on accessibility. Blindness is the issue.

Screen readers (manufacturer list) not only can turn Web sites and computer software into voice, they can also typically output text to Braille displays. (I wouldnt call them Braille TTYs, since those are used to communicate by telephone.) Braille displays are fascinating, rarefied, and costly devices. Tieman, Freedom Scientific, and ALVA are notable manufacturers. Not all that many people use them, in part because not all that many people read Braille (maybe 10% of blind people), though essentially all deaf-blind people read Braille.

Anyway, for a Web site that does not include multimedia, the fact that youre also deaf has no influence on accessibility if youre already blind. For a deaf-blind person using a screen reader with a Braille display, ordinary Web accessibility becomes the issue, though Id say that navigation help becomes much more important there. Experienced speech-output users run speech at superhuman speeds (300 words a minute is not uncommon), meaning you can burn through a page, albeit in serial fashion, pretty quickly. Given that Braille displays provide one or a couple of lines of Braille at a time, its a more time-consuming procedure.

Now, for sites that do contain multimedia, there is no viable option. An obvious course of action (requested by one activist group) would be to combine caption transcripts and audio-description scripts so that one could essentially read a text rendering of a videoclip, but there is no technology that can actually do that yet. (Yet. I have plans.) Combined script-transcripts of this sort have been attempted manually a couple of times (and I mentioned the idea back in 1999), but I dont know of any research on how well it all worked.

Alternative (non-computer) devices

by superflippy

Increasingly, people are using non-computer devices (cell phones, PDAs) to browse Web sites. What alternative devices are disabled people using, and how are they using them in ways Web developers might not have considered (e.g. voice browser in cell phone)?

Im not really up on that topic. The PAC Mate is one such device; its essentially a screen reader without a screen or free-standing computer.

Accessible site, or accessible browser?

by vofka

I am a partially-sighted person, and I have to admit that I do frequently have difficulty with accessibility issues, particularly with large corporate Web sites which all seem to be full-flow multimedia blitzes which require 1600x1200 resolution or higher, and usually override the default browser fonts to make them smaller.

However, there are a number of browsers, such as Mozilla (just one example, Im sure there are others!) which allow the user to zoom the text on a page, to override colour settings etc.

Though it is undoubtedly important for Webmasters to pay great thought to the design of their sites in terms of colour, font size and multimedia content, how much relative importance should be placed on browser design, and the browsers ability to override the design decisions of the creator of a site?

Its important and overlooked. It would be nice if we had a browser that actually supported all of HTML; we dont (no, not even Mozilla). Then it would be nice if CSS1 and CSS2 were fully supported admittedly an onerous task what with the myriad interactions and the various ambiguities in the spec.

At that point, yes, the user customizability in CSS and the many options available in HTML would presumably be up to the user to control. I think its ridiculous that the only really effective way to override a page authors CSS is for you, the harried, humble Web-surfer, to write your own CSS declarations (dont forget !important!) and activate the file in your browser, if thats even possible. This is the sort of thing that should be built into browser preferences, available for easy use. The first time you start up a browser, it should explicitly ask you if you have any accessibility requirements; a lot of people dont even know about what few customization features browsers currently offer.

Ill make another of my analogies. Remember the lack of visual sophistication of accessibility advocates? They want designers to work at their level by providing accessibility, but they never seem to understand that the converse is also true accessibility activists must learn to work at designers level by providing good site design. By the same token, if page authors are expected to use every practical accessibility feature, then browser makers must be expected to support all of them and support them well.

In the immortal words of Comedy Central, Weve upped our standards. Up yours!

See also: User Agent Accessibility Guidelines.

Physical vs. cognitive political clout

by Aquitaine

Dear Mr. Clark,

I am a Web developer for the Program on Employment and Disability at the School of Industrial Labor Relations at Cornell University. Web accessibility is a serious issue for us, and we try to keep abreast of innovative approaches to design so we can find that elusive place where universal accessibility meets intelligent and aesthetically pleasing layout. We recently spoke with Cynthia Waddell (one of 8 authors of Constructing Accessible Web Sites, also out fairly recently) on this subject, but I found her unwilling to commit to anything other than suggestions rather than real technical solutions.

There are two sticky issues that I have encountered. The first is the notion of universal access. Mrs. Waddell indicated that, working with the W3C, she was coming up with a list of Web sites that met Priorities 13 of the W3C WAI and were still aesthetically impressive (she did not have a list ready). As you are no doubt aware, many sites that tout universal access are themselves victims of poor design -- the problem of Yes, its W3C/WAI compliant across the board, but its ugly as sin. Do you believe that a site can have a single interface that is truly universally accessible, or do you believe that sites should have alternate interfaces? (The Web equivalent of Do we have a ramp and stairs or just a ramp?)

Along those lines, it is apparent to me that the accessibility guidelines are designed to be useful in a manner proportional to the lobbying power of disability rights groups. That is to say, blind people and deaf people, although they comprise extraordinarily small percentages of people with disabilities, have an enormous amount of political clout when compared to people with cognitive disorders -- ADD, ADHD, dyslexia, autism, schizo-affective disorder, schizophrenia, et cetera. Because these disability groups lack the considerable power of a strong advocacy group, do you feel that they have been left by the wayside when it comes to Section 508 or WAI? (And do you personally believe that total-WAI compliance is necessary, or just Section 508?)

My apologies for several questions at once, but we take this issue very seriously here and your answers will go a long way to helping us do what we do to better suit the community that ILR serves.

Thanks so much, Samuel W. Knowlton

To answer your first question: A single interface works for most Web sites. You can simply make the site itself intrinsically accessible to most disability groups.

The only alternative the question seems to envisage is specifically custom-designing an alternative interface for disabled users. In other words, a site would exist in two or more predesigned forms. Thats not the only way.

Some work is being done to permit people and the devices they use to specify formats and capabilities they may possess or require. Have a look at Composite Capabilities/Preferences Profiles. It all boils down to semantic markup again. A single HTML page, if marked up properly, could be visited by a plain-Jane browser and displayed in a way thats familiar to nondisabled users; nothing special would happen.

But if you had a CC/PP-compliant browser or other device, and if the page were coded correctly, and if the server understood CC/PP protocols, then the page would automatically reconfigure itself to your needs without the original page authors having to do anything special. In fact, authors could not predict what kind of transformations would occur, nor would they care.

So a few things could happen. If youre totally blind, your page could be rearranged so the search box and content are at the top, with sidebars, navbars, and anything else uninteresting at the end and no images loaded at all. A low-vision person could ask for larger type on content sections and normal-sized type everywhere else, unless a command were issued to blow up, say, a navbar. (There could be continuous interaction between the user and the server.)

XHTML 2.0 might push this concept along a little, what with its section element, but its all still a pipe dream, really.

Now, as to the second question, putting blind and deaf people together in a group claimed to have an enormous amount of political clout is not really applicable to Web accessibility. Deaf people face very few accessibility barriers in using the Web multimedia is pretty much it. Blind people face very large barriers because the Web is a visual medium. Theres a qualitative difference.

Its true that people with cognitive disabilities have been neglected in Web accessibility. Why? Few people in the wider accessibility field have expertise on the topic. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, when its finished, will contain many more provisions for this group.

The qualitative difference remains. It is arguably difficult or impossible to make Web sites most of which are dominated by text genuinely accessible even to certain specific groups with cognitive disabilities. Remedies proposed in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 drafts would not guarantee access for learning-disabled people. Some of those remedies involve adding illustrations (non-text content) to every single page (yes, the Web Accessibility Initiative may issue that requirement) or rewriting the page according to some kind of half-arsed, doctrinaire editing scheme.

There wouldnt be the same jump in accessibility between a noncompliant site and one that meets those guidelines as you would find with, say, visual impairment. Sites would end up being merely less confusing as opposed to not confusing. You might have met the spec, but you could not be sure you had achieved accessibility.

Certain cognitive disabilities do not even require accommodation online.

Moreover, while accessibility for many other disability groups almost never alters the visual appearance of a page (visible skip-navigation links are a counterexample), it could be argued that a page thats truly accessible to people with learning or cognitive disabilities would have to be custom-created by experts. Thats the stark truth involved in achieving high accessibility for this group. You have to alter content as opposed to metadata or presentation. To accommodate other disabilities, you add information, like alt texts; to accommodate certain learning disabilities, you must remove or alter information.

I am in favour of improved accessibility for cognitively-disabled persons, but Ill only support proposals that can be shown to actually make sites accessible to that group. Im also not willing to destroy the Web as we know it ostensibly in order to save it for a disability group whose needs might not even be met in the process.

Nobody has presented credible evidence that current proposals actually will work, and certainly the evidence supporting the current WCAG 2.0 proposals is weak. In other words, if we want to fix this problem, its going to take a lot more work.

And to answer the final question, Section 508 regulations backhandedly incorporate almost all of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, but go beyond the latter in certain respects. Both guideline sets have all sorts of problems, but complying with either of them will assure reasonable accessibility for large numbers of people.

Comments

Above and beyond the call of duty

[redtail1]

From the blurb...

I copy-edited all the questions, but the words are all the same; they are now merely spelled and capitalized correctly. I think all the links work.

Very cool. Hire him!

Re:Above and beyond the call of duty

[anthony_dipierro]

But only if he promises to stop capitalizing "web."

Re:Above and beyond the call of duty

[anthony_dipierro]

"Life is just to damn short to worry about grammar on Slashdot!" - CmdrTaco

Re:Above and beyond the call of duty

[kalidasa]

There's only one Web. There's only one Bible. There's only one White Album. They're proper nouns. World Wide Web (and Web when used to mean the WWW) and Internet should be capitalized, regardless of what the style books say.

Re:Above and beyond the call of duty

[anthony_dipierro]

Yeah, I know it's proper, but it looks stupid.

Re:Above and beyond the call of duty

[TechnoLust]

"I copy-edited all the questions, but the words are all the same; they are now merely spelled and capitalized correctly." ... It's a little different from our usual style, but variety is the spice of Slashdot.

Like they said, /. wouldn't be /. without the spelling and grammar errors. ;-)

Re:Above and beyond the call of duty

[nzhavok]

really? well you should check out German then you'd love it, all nouns are capitalized :)

Re:Above and beyond the call of duty

[dillon_rinker]

And there are many internets, but only one Internet.

Funny, though...there are many phone systems, but there is no Phone System. Or am I missing something?

Re:Above and beyond the call of duty

[tomhudson]

They're either proper nouns (in which case, capitalize them) or just plain nouns. For example, You said "there's only one Bible". Bible == "book of books", (66 books in the bible), comes from the greek "biblios" for book. So, is there more than one Bible?

Well, there are over 1,000 different religions in the world, each with their own "book", or Bible.

Then there's all the software "Bibles". For example, perl coders call the Camel Book their Bible.

Besides, whatever happened to the Internet2 initiative? Or, more realistically, since there are large segments of the internet that are not accessable to each other (gov't policies, domain-blacklisting, ISP blocking, white-lists, black-lists, etc), it can ONLY be argued that there is no longer a single coherent Internet, just a collection of linked inter-nets (which is what the so-called Internet was supposed to be). So there isn't even one "Internet".

Re:Above and beyond the call of duty

[Rick the Red]

There's only one White Album.

Actually, there were several "White Albums." When The Beatles was first released, on November 22, 1968, it came in both mono (PMC 7067-8) and stereo (PCS 7067-8), so there were two "White Albums" right from the start; the list just grew from there.

Re:Above and beyond the call of duty

[kalidasa]

Bible as the name for the Christian holy book is a proper noun. Al Quran is not called "the Bible" by its users. And it is actually from Greek "biblos, byblos" for book; "biblion" is a later Greek word for book. (See Edward Maunde Thompson, "An Introduction to Greek and Latin Paleography" chapter 5 for a discussion of the various Greek and Latin words for book.
The Camel Book (capitalized, there is only one) is a bible (lower case; metaphorical use of "bible" to mean "a book of canonical importance to a given community" rather than as the "name" of the book.)
See The Chicago Manual of Style for further discussion.
Yes, originally "the Internet" was a network of networks. Nowadays, though, "Internet" means the collection of all computers with assigned IP numbers when they are connected together. One can also refer to "an internet," but that is something different from "the Internet."

Re:Above and beyond the call of duty

[tomhudson]

Thanks for replying. Here's a few more thoughts...

Just because a group of "christians" appropriates a word and upper-cases it doesn't give them exclusive use of the term.

Notice, for example, how you proper-cased "The Camel Book", even though there's more than one (it's gone through 3 versions) whereas what you refer to as "The Bible" is supposedly canonical - even though it has gone through literally hundreds of revisions, additions, etc., and there are so many different versions out today, each which claims to be the "authentic bible", and no two exactly alike; this being especially noteworthy since the earliest (partial only) texts are from the 3rd century AD, and complete texts only start from the 9th. Please note that I'm using the term "canonical" in the same sense that Bibliophiles do - "measuring rod or standard". It seems that "The Bible" is then many "standards", and hence no standard at all. Rather, it's the paper version of "broken telephone".

There really is no more "Internet". Not if you are referring to the collection of all computers with assigned IP numbers when they are connected together. See my comment about white/black-lists, government restrictions on access to other countries, etc. Not to be anal, but what we knew as the Internet died a few years ago, thanks, in large part, to spam and script kiddies. And, with the coming of ubiquitous wireless networking and alternate DNS schemes (see the OpenDNS project), in a few years, what was known as the Internet (capitalized) will not even be the biggest collection of networked computers/devices.

There are many style manuals, but they talk about style,and style changes with time, as does the meaning of words. Which is useful - otherwise we'd be hard pressed for puns :-)

Re:Above and beyond the call of duty

[GoRK]

It's funny that with all this talk of capitalization and style guidelines, you are all still putting book names inside of quotation marks, when they really should be underlined or italisized.

Re:Above and beyond the call of duty

[kalidasa]

I capitalize Bible, I capitalize al Quran, I capitalize Torah. I also don't lower case the names of ethnicities or religious groups, as that style is often used in racialist rhetoric (for instance, quite a bit of ink has been spelled over spellings of the word "Jew" without a capital). Your argument about the Internet is overly politicized. Most wireless networking still uses IP. And I seriously doubt an alternate DNS scheme will go far for a long, long time.

Re:Above and beyond the call of duty

[tomhudson]

Oh well, here goes ... :-)

1. As far as capitalizing 'Bible', for the first few centuries, they didn't have any choice - the Greek alphabet originally had only upper-case. Lower-case is a (relatively speaking) modern invention;
2. I think you'll agree that people who want to see racism or intolerance based upon whether a perticular groups' name is capitalized or not have too much time on their hands;
3. Sure, wireless networking uses IP. It doesn't mean that it can't be used to form a complete alternate to "The Internet", especially when a combo of wireless, alternate DNS schemas, and neighborhood wans can bring down the average users' cost by 90% or more. That's one of the reasons most fiber is going to stay dark for a long, loooong time ...

Re:Above and beyond the call of duty

[kalidasa]

As far as capitalizing 'Bible', for the first few centuries, they didn't have any choice - the Greek alphabet originally had only upper-case. Lower-case is a (relatively speaking) modern invention;

Nor the Latin. I take it you read ancient Greek? O tekna Kadmou, tou palai nea trophe . . .

Note that I used the English title, not the Greek. We're takling about contemporary English style, not koine. And the idea of a canonical Bible dates to about the 4th century, when there was no lower case; but by the 9th century, there was no upper case, only lower case (bicameral casing developed from the use of both miniscule and majuscule at the same time much later in the tradition).

I think you'll agree that people who want to see racism or intolerance based upon whether a perticular groups' name is capitalized or not have too much time on their hands

Let's just say that it is often done intentionally to insult people and leave it at that. Frankly, anyone who continues a discussion in slashdot for days has no right to complain that folks have too much time on their hands, no?

Sure, wireless networking uses IP. It doesn't mean that it can't be used to form a complete alternate to "The Internet"

That it can does not mean either that it will be or that it has been. The Internet as we understand it does still exist; if there is to be an alternate Ethernet (I do wish that term were still free; perhaps, given the subject matter this thread has drifted into, Aithernet?) it will have it's own name.

Good corresponding with you, though, even if I don't agree with everything you're saying.

Slashdot is dominated by words

[stratjakt]

And so is his response!

I propose a new mod of -1:Too many words!

Re:Slashdot is dominated by words

[vsprintf]

Good point! I was surprised by the shortness of Shatner's answers, especially from someone who supposedly writes books. Apparently, Slashdot does not pay by the word.

Whatever....

[mansemat]

Whatever.

Let's see, a guy takes some of his precious time and answers questions for your readers (unpaid I assume), and you show your gratitude with a snide comment such as Whatever. because he took a little extra time to format things the way he wanted to.

Way to go /.! editors...

Tools.

Re:Whatever....

[stratjakt]

>> but variety is the spice of Slashdot

Yeah, sure it is..

"Hey guys linux look linux linux linux linux ms sucks linux linux OSX i love linux beowulf clusters."

Any 'variety' opinion wise is modded down into oblivion.

Re:Whatever....

[wheany]

Especially since Slashdot uses almost, but not quite, the exact opposite of valid HTML.

Besides: Tables for formatting are dead, long live css. If they used css, they wouldn't have to break long strings of characters with spaces, because only the offending comment would be wide, not the whole damn page...

Re:Whatever....

[b0r1s]

They're clearly upset that he performed simple editorial tasks to correct spelling and capitalization. Obviously those are things editors should do, but the slashdot editors are notorious for being unable to spell even trivial words correctly.

Yet another reason that this site will not make it past 2003.

Re:Whatever....

[dildatron]

If you are serious, I will bet you whatever you want that slashdot will make it past 2003.

Re:Whatever....

[Malc]

Damn right! He put far more effort in to it than Billy boy did last week. Shatner left me with a bad (worse?) impression. Thank you Mr. Clark.

Re:Whatever....

[Flavio]

Well said.

Slashdot "editors" seem to take pride in their shitty spelling and grammar, and someone who actually takes their time to produce readable, correct text is a target for their contempt.

It all goes back to what we've all been saying for several years (and CmdrTaco has admitted it himself): if not for Slashdot, these guys would be flipping burgers.

Note that I'm not pressing anyone to act like a square -- I just want them to have a little more class.

Re:Whatever....

[FattMattP]

Let's see, a guy takes some of his precious time and answers questions for your readers (unpaid I assume), and you show your gratitude with a snide comment such as Whatever. because he took a little extra time to format things the way he wanted to.

I hope people remember that before they subscribe to slashdot. They'll be paying to remove the ads, not to have a higher quality web site.

Re:Whatever....

[0x0d0a]

Tables for formatting are dead

How about *not* trying to force a format on the end user?

Re:Whatever....

[Anonymous Coward]

VA Software is trading at about $1.19. They'll be delisted by Q2.

They lost $4,000,000 in Q1 2003, and $54,000,000 (yes, 54 MILLION) in Q1 2002. They do have quite a large chunk of money in the bank, but losing $16,000,000 a year, they'll run out in three years.

They're leveling off, but they're certainly not anywhere near profitable. Just check out the chart.

Re:Whatever....

[curtisk]

I agree, when I read the story header, I was suprised at the "Whatever."

Maybe the editors are just sad and angry that guests and interviewees are well aware of the editorial *cough* standards here and since this was HIS reply to questions asked of him, he wanted to make sure they were presented properly. Those being a reflection of his ideas and opinions.

Re:Whatever....

[The J Kid]

Yes...they should use CSS....
It actually makes a page much prettier, yes you read that correctly, prettier.

Just take a look at the (unoffical) Phoenix FAQ.

It's in strict XHTML & CSS... and it looks wonderfull!

Re:Whatever....

[JebusIsLord]

For sure, in a content rich site like w3.org i would agree. However, I wanted my homepage to be pretty so I did the meager content in xhtml 1.1 and all the formatting with the use of CSS and DIV tags. My MP3 database is the only thing in a table, because thats what it IS, a TABLE.

Re:Whatever....

[dildatron]

I am quite aware of their financial situation; however my bet still stands. I bet that slashdot.org will make it through 2003. If you are so certain, why don't you bet me? We can place money for a beer in escrow.

Re:Whatever....

[kwerle]

Yet another reason that this site will not make it past 2003.

Woah. You have grossly overestimated the masses.

Have you never watched prime-time TV? If you have managed to avoid it, then the only question is: who do you think reads /.?

Re:Whatever....

[Monkeyman334]

I agree. I think it's especially lame that they said this to the accessibility guy. I mean, here I am, 20/20 vision and great hearing, and I still have trouble reading that awful spelling and grammar CmdrTaco puts out. Joe said alt tags are probably the single most important part in making accessible websites. He probably left out proper spelling of words because he thought it would be obvious for anyone who is responsible for the content they put on their website.

Re:Whatever....

[nhavar]

I guess I would want to know which sites you are visiting that could be so slow and is it CSS or script that's causing it to be slow. Just because someone claims CSS use doesn't mean that they are using it correctly or that they don't have other things on the site slowing it down.

From peronal experience I can say that I've used CSS with DIVs and SPANs and the sites are about 25% lighter, display relatively identical in IE5+/Moz/Opera and I haven't noticed any slow downs, quite the contrary.

Why work out the bugs for CSS? - Because it's the right thing to do. Markup should be used for what it works best for. Tables were designed for the structuring of tabular information and got shoehorned into use as a layout mechanism. Since they were not designed from the get go as a layout mechanism that means they are not as flexible or robust. Creating robust sites using tables (sites that reflow in different resolutions or sites that work well with screen readers) is made much more difficult when using tables.

Re:Whatever....

[hysterion]

Just take a look at the (unoffical) Phoenix FAQ [texturizer.net].

It's in strict XHTML & CSS... and it looks wonderfull!

Sorry but it looks rather brain-damaged to me. First thing you notice, part of the menu is hiding below the bottom of the page, and there is no scroller to get to it. Second thing you notice, half of the page's main area is taken by this message:

Problems viewing the menu?

If you're using a low resolution (800x600 or lower), the whole menu may not be displayed when using the default style. To make the text smaller, select Low Resolution below:

Default Style | Low Resolution

Special sources to deal with different client configuartions... that sounds so 1990s...

Re:Whatever....

[Fweeky]

Almost all css sites I have used have been really slow when scrolling (this was on Opera and Mozilla, I don't know about IE). With a different div for each comment I imagine this might be fscking slow, although I should point out I'm a programmer not a web developer.

Uh, you realise, of course, that table layout is actually significantly more complex computationally than the CSS box model, and most tables based layouts use a LOT more tables than CSS sites use divs.

I imagine the CSS sites you are talking about use fixed positioning in some way; either for menus (e.g. W3's Style Pages), or some fixed background (e.g. css/edge) -- these techniques can be slow, especially on lesser machines with anemic graphics cards. That it uses CSS is irrelevent, it's just much more complex to blit bits of a page (and maybe apply some transparency to others, while redrawing yet others) than it is to move a basic superbitmap around.

stylesheets are implemented differently in different browsers, and the implementations are bound to be more dynamic than tables. The bugs for tables have been worked out why do it again for css.

Because it's better. It has significant payoffs at all levels, in terms of making websites more accessable, more maintainable, more flexible, and less disgusting to look under the hood at.

As a programmer, I'm sure you'll appreciate the difference good design and a good language can make to your work. Once upon a time C++ was (and to some extent still is) plagued with crappy compilers with different behaviors and incompatabilities. If C worked and the issues about it well known, why bother with C++? Or any other language?

Isn't slashcode opensource? Why don't you go in and fix it yourself if it bothers you?

I don't use SlashCode. I don't particularly like SlashCode. Therefore I do not develop for SlashCode. Unless someone asks me nicely, of course.

Re:Whatever....

[ez76]

How about *not* trying to force a format on the end user?

Taking your suggestion to the extreme, why don't we just have NBC broadcast the dialogue of Friends in XML so we are free to enact it any way we choose?

Sorry, there is something to be said for presentation.

Re:Whatever....

[the way, what're you]

Shatner left me with a bad (worse?) impression.

Thank goodness you didn't say Shatner left a bad taste in your mouth. That's a mental image I don't need.

Re:Whatever....

[an_mo]

I looked at that FAQ and I noticed that the stylesheet lets you do something useful: put the menu at the bottom of the file, something that the interviewee would have solved with ugly "skip menu" links.

In the page you mentioned keyboard navigation start from the body of the page, not from the left menu. Really cool.

Re:Whatever....

[imorgan]

They lost $4,000,000 in Q1 2003,

Cool! Can I have a copy of your CrystalBall.exe?

Re:Whatever....

[nhavar]

I will never understand people using phrases like "this late in the game" as if we are at the end or too far into use to go back and do it correctly. The fact is that the newer browsers are becoming more and more standards compliant and the standards are becoming more and more modular. The older browsers are becoming increasingly less used and in most cases you don't want a site to display identically for each user agent. I want a site to reflow based on screen resolution and user agent. A site should not look the same between a PDA and a Desktop browser at 1600x1200 one or both would be unreadable.

To assume that we want these things because we are all highminded bookworms only devoted to the written word of the standards gods is rediculous and ignorant. We want these things because it will make our jobs easier, our content more manageable, and more flexible to a wider range of consumer. Tables serve you - great - keep on using them even as the momentum pushes towards CSS and then play catch up later.

Re:Whatever....

[the way, what're you]

I figured it would just attract wise-guy comments from ACs

Thank goodness you didn't say "I figured I would just attract wiseguys." That's a mental image I don't need.

Re:Whatever....

[nhavar]

I seriously suggest that you take a look at wired's site or richinstyle, webstandards.org, alistapart, bluerobot, glish, etc. and see how light weight and flexible their code is. (not a style="font-weight:bolder" in sight) It's obvious that you haven't worked much with html or CSS.

First your asking everyone to pretend. Why should we need to pretend that something works in a way that it doesn't.

Let's say for the sake of argument that I have a four column layout that I want to reflow to a two column layout and possibly a one column layout depending on the screen. With a table I CANNOT DO THIS. Tables are not semantically or structurally designed to do this. Tables are exactly what they imply TABULAR and rigid, they are not designed to reflow or wrap rows or columns. The point of CSS is avoiding all of the dorked up attributes of tables such as spanning. You don't have to add a huge amount of code to get things to appear the same as a table that's not the way it works. Additionally you wouldn't always need to use SPAN and DIV tags CSS can be applied to any element and does not need to be applied inline as your example suggests. This is where a lot of the savings and flexibility comes in - not needing to go into every single tag and add style attributes.

The point is use what works best for what you are doing. Use tables for data and CSS for layout and style. It's easy, it doesn't have to made more complicated, and it can be fast efficient and lightweight.

Re:Whatever....

[nzhavok]

Uh, you realise, of course, that table layout is actually significantly more complex computationally than the CSS box model, and most tables based layouts use a LOT more tables than CSS sites use divs.

Actually I don't have enough experience having neither written enough css/table webpages, nor having written any code to display them.

I imagine the CSS sites you are talking about use fixed positioning in some way

perhaps, however unfortunatly I don't actually have any examples to provide. The only qualification I can give here is when I enforce the user.css in Opera these pages have gone from slow to fast.

As a programmer, I'm sure you'll appreciate the difference good design and a good language can make to your work

I sure do and if I was creating websites today I would most likely use it (I have used it and found it to be very straightforward). I'd probably be hesitant to upgrade any significant webpage I had already coded in HTML unless it had problems.

When it comes to HTML I really couldn't care less whether they are coded properly or not as long as they display fine, many people disagree (and I used to as well) and believe they should be created better however I think there are too many fscked sites already and these people are dreaming. I think XHTML and XML pages should strictly enforced, however I've come to think of HTML as webpages for idiots.

Re:Whatever....

[hysterion]

No, cretin,

How civil, AC. Thanks.

there are two style sheets that can be instantaneously switched, not Special sources to deal with different client configuartions. Why don't you try it, since you obviously have a lower resolution than 800x600? Would you prefer it had some sort of bogus Javascript automatic screen resolution detection

Maybe you'll explain me how two style sheets don't make more than one source? Regardless, any system that has to devote half of the useful area to explaining how to get around its shortcomings is badly laid out.

Oh, and I just did try it (Mozilla 1.2+), and guess what, AC, it doesn't work unless I especially enable javascript. And when I do, the menu covers part of the text. What was your point?

Re:Whatever....

[FattMattP]

So what? My comment had nothing to do with removing ads and everything to do with what the slashdot editors see as what they think you should get for your money. Instead of getting a higher quality web site for your money, you get a site with no ads. Big deal. As you pointed out, removing ads in trivial as it is.

Re:Whatever....

[hysterion]

Hi :-) I don't dispute the virtues of css in general, at all. All I meant (and maintain) is that this is a rather poor implementation.

a little different from our usual style

[MrFredBloggs]

Yeah, if he spell-checked/corrected it first...

Breaking news !!!

[stud9920]

Rob Malda, CTO of Slashdot, under the name of "CmdrTaco", decided he would take two hours of his precious time to make slashdot's code compliant to a standard. Any standard. Slashdot's stock price dropped even lower than usually, it is understood that wasting TWO WHOLE HOURS to write compliant code was too big a spoil for the already too low cash reserve of the company. Film at 11.

Viva la difference!

[airrage]

I think one of this guy's answers had as many words as the entire Bill Shatner interview. Nice job.

Re:Viva la difference!

[zbuffered]

this guy rambles on about stuff.

This is /.! Rambling on about stuff is what it's all about!

"Whatever"

[Anonymous Coward]

It's nice to see slashdot's dedication to supporting and implementing standards.

Re:"Whatever"

[Anonymous Coward]

"Standards are law! Standards are great! Standards should be followed always! Except when they apply to us."

Re:"Whatever"

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the "Whatever" was a response to "I copy-edited all the questions, but the words are all the same; they are now merely spelled and capitalized correctly. I think all the links work."

Methinks some of the Slashdot editors have very thin skins to take offense at remarks not even directed at them - unless they Do know about their own sloppy work, and resent it being pointed out, even indirectly?...

Re:"Whatever"

[fobbman]

I thought that snide and condescending comments added to /. stories by the editors WAS a standard?

Re:VERY LARGE HEADLINES

[elmegil]

The XHTML tags, while they don't affect your display on "most" browsers, do appear to break the information up into chunks that could be identified seperately by browsers with the accessability features he talks about. He's got it split into sections which presumably could be summarized for someone with, for example, a vision disability, so they could skip around without having to hear the entire page read to them.

Because Slashdot is broken.

[Levine]

Because Slashdot does not properly utilize the Heading tags.

The concept of the H1-H6 tags is to subdivide a page into distinct sections, like the headings of a paper. Therefore, perhaps the title of your blog would be in H1 brackets, each post you make to it having its title in H2, and if you wanted to sub-divide your posts into logical divisions you could use H3-H6.

Not to toot my own horn, but I've accomplished this sort of thing on my own at http://thirtyfour.org - the website is entirely readable without any extraneous formatting whatsoever. Content should be seperate from design: if you remove the "design" from your site your "content" should still be accessible. On Slashdot this is impossible: the content is shoehorned into tables and divisions which make things difficult.

Anyway, there you go.

levine

Re:Because Slashdot is broken.

[zapfie]

Might I suggest you avoid the underline tag at all costs? Many users associate underlines with hypertext links.. so they will click it and nothing will happen.

Re:Because Slashdot is broken.

[0x0d0a]

If you *really* want to be true to the content-separation ideology (the way HTML really should be done), you shouldn't use underline at all -- instead, use EM or something that implies emphasis. The user may be using a system that does not support underlining, or may not like the use of underlining on his web page.

Of course, few web designers are capable of designing a proper HTML page, so most of this isn't cared about any more.

Re:Because Slashdot is broken.

[zapfie]

Troll, but I'll bite. One important part of any interface is consistancy. When you break consistancy, you break the model of how things work that the user has created in their heads. For example, when you see an underlined letter on a menu, you know that you can press ALT and that letter to select it. When you see a scrollbar, you know you can use it to navigate a document. When you see underlined text on a webpage, you know you can click it. When you start breaking these things, the user is no longer sure if what they learned works in all situations.

Re:Because Slashdot is broken.

[JebusIsLord]

mine does. http://www.autobotcity.net

as an aside, the jetfire transparent image in the background only works properly with Mozilla/Netscape 6+, not IE because it has a broken CSS implementation. Check it out in both if you dont believe me. ALL my formatting is done in CSS (no tables or anything), and everything validates.

Re:Because Slashdot is broken.

[iangoldby]

See Eric Meyer's CSS Edge site for the original and details of how it is done.

+1 Informative. I thank you 8-)

Re:Because Slashdot is broken.

[JebusIsLord]

I actually lost that URL so thank YOU. I sure wish MS would release a version of IE that does it justice though. My friends keep telling me my site looks fugly.

Re:Because Slashdot is broken.

[Fweeky]

I've accomplished this sort of thing on my own at http://thirtyfour.org - the website is entirely readable without any extraneous formatting whatsoever. Content should be seperate from design

Funny, I didn't see much in the way of design there at all -- in fact, you've abused certain tags, like blockquote, to achieve presentational aims -- exactly the opposite of what you seem to be aiming for, unless you want to argue that your blog is a load of quotations of yourself. So, where are your <cite>s? :P

Now, my turn: http://www.aagh.net/ -- see how I provide a load of <link>s at the top for UA's to make use of, how the navbar is a marked up nested list, despite not looking much like one in CSS capable clients. Note the content is divided liberally with divs which, once stripped, leave you with a perfectly readable and well structured XHTML document. Note the print stylesheet, so if you want to print a page, you don't get a useless navbar printed with the content. Also note that it's not finished, but you get my point :)

Re:Because Slashdot is broken.

[Tattva]

I disagree. It is certainly okay to use XHTML as a document format, obeying all the rules about the intent of each tag, and use it raw with a CSS to render it into a display format, but that is hardly the only valid solution.

The important thing is to keep content and presentation seperate. There are an infinite number of ways to do this if you're willing to write backend source code. One way of doing that is XHTML and CSS. It has the minor advantage of not requiring backend code in the simplest case.

Using a backend database with a proprietary format and an HTML rendering scheme of some kind is another way of achieving the same ends. I haven't looked at Slashdot's formatting, but it is apparent that they have chosen a backend database strategy. Cry all you want about the intent of HTML, there is no reason to treat it with any more deference than Flash or any other arbitrary formatting language if you know which web browsers you care about (and can therefore test against them.) Developers care about the end user experience and development costs, not the standards conformance of their proprietary display technology. The only thing missing is an interchange format or standard format converters so that they can take external input (the raw XHTML recieved from Mr. Clark) and translate it into their backend format, for later display through their display filter. They already have this, as I am using it right now, but it could use extending.

I couldn't care less if they use FONT tags instead of stylesheets to achieve pretty formatting in the browsers they choose to support. If they can save time or make the output a little prettier by violating all of the anal-retentive HTML rules that have been retrofitted onto the standard, good for them. Their raw data is in a consistent, protected format (I assume), even if they didn't choose the naive backend XHTML format you so love.

Re:Because Slashdot is broken.

[JebusIsLord]

Dude, its a page visited by maybe 10 people a week, all friends. I really only intended it to be an experiment in formatting with CSS, and everyone who uses it uses Moz anyhow. I really couldn't care less if people don't visit it because of that. It's not like I'm marketing something on it.

Re:Because Slashdot is broken.

[mackstann]

I don't believe he stated that he intentionally broke it in IE. It sounds to me like he found something neat in CSS, decided to do it, then found out that it didn't work so well in IE. So what?

On my site, I use CSS :after, :before, :first-letter, :first-line, and :first-child selectors, which currently only work in Mozilla, but so what?? IE has an incomplete CSS implementation. I enjoy web design, doing [x]html, and CSS alot. I enjoy using the newest techniques, while still using standards compliant code. If IE is broken, and displays my correctly coded page wrong - I don't care. Get a better browser.

BTW - neither site fails to work in IE, only some visual effects are missing - hardly a big deal. You go to a website for information - right?

and one last btw - the navigation bar at right works in mozilla, but is mysteriously gone in IE, but it *should* work in IE, i need to get around to fixing that. ho hum.

I won't have to waste time going to a rank amateur's web site.

i'm sure he's crying.

Re:Because Slashdot is broken.

[Fweeky]

dude, your site doesn't render at all for me (moz1.0rc2/linux)

Fine in Moz 1.0.1 and 1.2.1/Win32 here. Although it does bring up one border rendering regression in 1.2.
Also, something's interfering with keyboard input (like CTRL-w)

Upgrade. I don't support prereleases ;)

I serve as application/xhtml+xml for Mozilla -- maybe rc2 is buggy with it.

Re:VERY LARGE HEADLINES

[aftk2]

It's an improvement (supposedly) because Clark marked up his text in regards to structure, not presentation. He didn't think "Hey, will make this text embarrassingly huge," instead he sought out his headings, and marked them accordingly. The real problem is that Slashdot's presentation is fugly, and it doesn't use CSS to set the tag to something less enormous.

The upside being, later on in /.'s life, if/when the site is pushed kicking and screaming away from font tags, the presentation of that one article will be relatively easy to fix. :-)

Wow!

[helstar]

He actually took the time to fix our spelling and grammar and Rob says "Whatever", not even a bit of thanks. Why not work on that extra-special spell check feature so many have been begging for?

Valid XHTML... not for MS

[Huge Pi Removal]

This is obviously the type of "valid XHTML" that crashes Mac IE (OS 9). Hmmmmm......

Exactly!

[sootman]

Joe: ...[T]he words are all... spelled and capitalized correctly. I think all the links work.
Roblimo: Whatever... It's a little different from our usual style...

Couldn't've said it better myself. :-)

Re:LOL

[elmegil]

It's not like he was able to force CSS stylesheets on slashdot to make the actual formatting look good as well as realistically breaking up the content.

Re:VERY LARGE HEADLINES

[Da VinMan]

Quite readable != the ability to consistently process.

Today's HTML is a travesty. Standards overlap each other, attributes for a tag are more or less context sensitive and dependent upon the given browser's interpretation, etc. Producing a readable HTML page might be fairly easy, as long as you don't care about the little things (like font size, positioning, etc.) across multiple browsers and their different versions (where each browser + version + platform is yet another testing permutation).

XHTML gives you the ability to standardize your markup and extend the markup in a systematic way. I haven't had the opportunity to use it in a project, so I won't say anymore than that right now. However, I do think that anything that clarifies HTML rendering is a good thing.

Re:VERY LARGE HEADLINES

[redtail1]

Mod this post up... aftk2 is right. We should be moving away from using (X)HTML for presentation. A simple H1 { font-size: large; } setting in a CSS file is all that's necessary.

too many words, too many notes

[Alien54]

And so is his response! I propose a new mod of -1:Too many words!

reminds me of the royal in the movie "Mozart" : "There are too many notes"

To which the reply was: "Tell me which ones you want me to take out"

Re:too many words, too many notes

[Alien54]

Wasn't that "Amadeus"?

You are Correct. Pardon my brain fart.

Re:VERY LARGE HEADLINES

[Nadir]

Because he used valid markup, as he explains in his replies. Especially the part about h1...h6 headings. The fact is you also need a good stylesheet to make it pretty.

Some Thoughts

[Alethes]

1) I bet a lot of people wish Captain Kirk had replied this thoroughly.

2) I bet there is now, or there will soon be, a huge market for web developers that specialize in accessiblity. This is definitely a few steps further than making sure all the major browsers can view your content.

3) I wish I had thought of this when the interview was up, but how difficult is it to create websites with text to speech software in mind? Would it be better to have a section that spells all the words phonetically so they are the most understandable to the end user? It seems that it should be possible to automate that process, rather than having to maintain two versions of the site, or having to create audio files that play automatically with an onMouseover.

Wired's new look

[joib]

Wired has introduced a new layout, which is xhtml compliant (and looks quite sophisticated too). See this interview for more info.

Re:Wired's new look

[indiigo]

Is the "World's Largest Casino" popup ad also XHTML compliant?

I know, I know, I should be using moz, but I'm lazy today and IE it is...

You should have removed the <html> tag!

[aWalrus]

I took a look at the source code for this page to see what he was talking about and I know the guy sent his very own file nicely formatted, but you guys should at least have removed the <html> <head> and <body> tags from his document. It is extremely bad form to insert a whole html document inside another one. I don't think this page renders well in most browsers. Maybe the Slashdot Editors can update the story removing that from the source code?
--

Re:Viva la difference! (THIS ONE)

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe this is the one you were referring to:

I'm not really up on that topic. The PAC Mate is one such device; it's essentially a screen reader without a screen or free-standing computer.

I've been reading Joe's articles for a while.

[mdemeny]

You may also be interested in his article in The Atlantic , The King of Closed Captions

Also, the content on his content-related weblog The Nublog is pretty interesting.

He may be abrasive sometimes, but he usually gets it right. Moreso than Jakob Neilsen.

Wait, who is this?

[poot_rootbeer]

This isn't at all what I expected the principal from Lean On Me to be like!

Why we have standards

[Alethes]

There's a Terry Pratchett quote I love that says, "Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions."

Standards make us more productive and efficient. Standards allow us to pull in all kinds of directions without running into eachother.

What disability laws are in effect?

[abhinavnath]

The interviewee talks about companies being forced/sued to be accessible, in the real world and on the web. Does anybody know what laws govern this? What is Section 508, or the WAI?

I'm not sure that there ought to be laws mandating accessibility to disabled people. I mean, that's really upto the business or individuals concerned.

Cover Photo

[Transient0]

Joe Clark has written a book. Does anyone else notice a striking similarity between the cover photo and a certain infamous image.

Sorry, not meaning to troll. I like Joe Clark, I also work in accessiblity. It's just that that image(the book cover) is right on his main page, and I can't go there without having my visual memory of things I would rather not remember activated.

Re:Cover Photo

[cybermace5]

That was pretty bad. Now we'll have "joeclark.org/book/" trolls. Where is the mercy in this world?

Re:Cover Photo

[Fnkmaster]

Well, both of those images are all about "accessibility" so in some very twisted way, it makes sense. Ugh.

Valid?

[brunson]

...or well-formed?

Re:Hypocrit

[roseanne]

> non-standard quotes

Because he didn't use &quot;? He used ISO-Latin-1 encoding and Entities &#8220; and &#8221; -- what are you using that doesn't display this? I'd say the tool is broken, not the markup. The only thing he could have done better was use the character entity names -- &ldquo; and &rdquo;.

Inconsistent

[new_breed]

Why is only the first headline numbered '1)' and the rest not?

Let's see

[Merovign]

(this is only half-joke)

Convert all web pages to accessible formats, convert all books (ever) to audio books, redesign pedestrian access for the sightless...

or put money into researching artificial eyes.

I honestly wonder which would be cheaper?

There is a real problem with spending all of your time accomodating a problem rather than fixing it.

I used to work with hearing-impaired people (have forgotten most of my ASL), there was a definite "subculture" atmosphere that really didn't spend any time caring about a cure, some of them (not all) just wanted other people to do the work for them.

Not to say that there should be no accomodation, there are no guarantees after all. But the problem with ADA and other such "devices" is that, like farm subsidies or AFDC, you can build a culture of entitlement that masks the problem instead of solving it.

Re:Let's see

[Ravagin]

But see, the point is that if you do all your websites to standards, that's a lot of the accessibility work done right there. It's not doing extra work for accesibility, it's doing the job right. And I'd even argue that making your website accessible (in 508 terms) is part of doing the job right - the web is about disseminating information and making it available to everyone.

Re:Let's see

[swb]

It's so damned expensive treating cancer, let's just stop all treatment and spend all the cash we save on preventative research...

Can you see the flaw?

Actually, no I can't see the flaw. My mother was terminal with breast cancer that had spread to her bones and internal organs. 12 months after the terminal diagnosis, she spent three weeks in the hospital with after kidney failure due to ureaters being pinched off by tumor growth. After this episode we had a long conversation with her oncologist (dad, mom, me and my sister) about the value of further chemotherapy. "Yes, it's still of some value. Remission could happen." MRI and bonescans indicated massive, agressive spread. After more chemo, she died about 4 months later.

So yes, I don't see the point of treating some cancers or stages of cancer unless maybe I'm getting rich off the insurance payments, like the greedy oncologist. We're all familiar with the People magazine stories of people who pulled the plug and climbed halfway into the coffin only to return to normal, cancer free life.

Only we're not familiar with the other 99% who suck chemo juice for maybe two years and end up dying horrible, painful, stretched-out deaths, so doped up they're hardly aware of themselves and those around them. (Mom was on a tasty cocktail of 5mg of atavan and 150 mg of morphine per day -- for comparison, I weigh 2.5 times what she weighed her last months and I got 30mg of morphine after surgery and could hardly stand, 2 mg of atavan makes me a drooling idiot).

There has to be a better way that both directs more benefits to the living (like affordable insurance premimums to cover survivable "problems" like childbirth), more dignity to the very sick (no chasing false hope!), and resources to find meaningful cures. Dumping $150k into 70 year olds with terminal cancer is cruel to them, their families and people who don't get to see a doctor for a sore throat because insurance needs to pay for terminal cases ineffective treatment.

Re:Let's see

[shannara256]

> Convert all web pages to accessible formats,
> convert all books (ever) to audio books,
> redesign pedestrian access for the sightless...
>
> or put money into researching artificial eyes.

One of the common misconceptions is that only the disabled benefit from accessible web pages and audio books and so on. Everybody benefits from these things.

For example, people on a long road trip listen to audio books, all the time. There's a market for audio books, and it consists of more than just the blind.

Standards-compliant web pages benefit not only the blind, but also those using Lynx, and those using their PDAs, and those using their cell phones. Besides that, are you going to argue that malformed HTML is a good thing? If you're going to do something, do it right. The defination for HTML 4.0 (at least, maybe earlier versions as well, I don't know) requires that you have an alt="" tag on all images; that right there improves accessibility a great deal.

Closed captioned TV shows and movies are a blessing for those who can hear perfectly as well as for those who can't hear at all. Personally, I keep closed captioning on all the time. I have excellent hearing, but sometimes I don't hear what the actors say because they're unclear, or someone is talking to me, or there's some other noise, and I'm able to look at the TV and read what was said. I intend to keep closed captioning on if & when I have kids, because I believe it will help them learn to read sooner/faster/better.

I don't know much about designing accessible buildings, but I'm willing to bet that there are similiar general-purpose benefits there, as well. For example, elevators and motorized doors, which are designed or included for wheelchair access, are also good for (say) making it easier to move carts around. It's much easier to wheel the cart containing a few thousand dollar's worth of equipment onto an elevator than it is to get the manpower required to carry it all up and down stairs.

> There is a real problem with spending all of
> your time accomodating a problem rather than
> fixing it.

That's true, but there's a problem with that statement: it's not the same money. You can't just reallocate all or even most of the money from improving accessibility to researching artificial eyes. They're two different industries, with their own markets (like with the audio books). Different people are going to put their money into each.

Re:Let's see

[pjrc]

(this is only half-joke)

But it's fully covered in Joe's answer to the question posted by "acehole".

Convert all web pages to accessible formats, convert all books (ever) to audio books, redesign pedestrian access for the sightless...

or put money into researching artificial eyes.

Joe put it very well. You obviously missed it:

I also reject, in the strongest possible terms, the offensive and offhand claim that accessibility can be achieved "at great expense." I believe the colloquial term for a claim like this is bullshit. "Updating" or retrofitting a site for accessibility does cost more than designing it properly in the first place, but that's true everywhere: Have you costed out adding barrier-free access to an old building vs. including it in the original designs? Retrofitting may cost more, but I deny that the expense is "great." Even very extensive sites with huge swaths of multimedia can be made accessible, and it is doubtful that, given the budgets of such sites, the expense would be "great."

I honestly wonder which would be cheaper?

I honestly wonder if you read the answer to the second question, where Joe says that HTML-based sites can take care of much of the accessibility problem by simply using valid HTML with good ALT tags, and including a "skip nav links" link near the top of the page.

Even if you went crazy and did all this stuff, it's all pretty simple and easy things to do. Much of it is just good practice in HTML. Most of the "captioning" (that ordinary IE users never see) is helpful for indexing in google and other search engines, which is pretty good reason to do it anyway.

The key point is that it's not expensive. Almost every single image on every good website involves quite a bit of work, at least croping and scaling. Many times a thumbnail is created and a link made to the larger image, or a dedicated page with the larger image. Fancy drop shadowing and other effects are commonly added, as are rounded corners. Considerable work goes of course goes into creating the image in the first place, wether that's composing it or taking a photo (posing the subject, lighting, transfering from the digital camera or negative, etc).

The effort (and expense) of an ALT tag is so very minor compared to the effort/expense that went into the original preparation of the image and its placement within the site.

Likewise, adding a "skip nav" link into the nav bar is a rather trivial task compared to the design of the nav bar itself. Many sites are built from a template (like mine). All you need to do is add it into the template. Yes, that does take some small amount of work, which is more than doing nothing, but compared to all the work that went into the nav bar, it's really very minor. Sites that don't update from a template STILL go to all the trouble of having navigation links. They're doing it _somehow_, and adding just more more tiny link, that's the same on every page and never even "breaks" because it always points within the same page is really just a very tiny increase.

It's really not hard. I did it to my site today after reading Joe's responses. I probably spent about 20 minutes on it, mostly updating some test pages before updating the live site. Now, I'll admit that I haven't updated the home page and some special pages yet... but the vast majority of pages that are built from the template were very easily updated. Also, I should admit that I checked a several sites and nearly all are using the approach of a small invisible GIF with "skip navigational links" as the ALT text (contrary to Joe's suggestion)... so I went with the established practice used on lots of other major sites that are targeted at people with disabilities.

Nearly all my images (about 630 unique files on pjrc.com) have ALT text already, as that's just a normal part of good HTML practice.

It's really very cheap and easy. I can afford it. I spent no money, 20 minutes on the "skip nav" link, and I just type an ALT tag for every image (which is less work than even the simplest image processing). It costs a LOT less than research to develop artificial organs!

Re:Let's see

[Malcontent]

"or put money into researching artificial eyes"

To paraphrase Chris Rock.

Patient: "Doctor I can't see"
Doctor: "I can't do anything for you, here take this dog"
Patient: "WTF? There are people who can see that can't take of a dog!"

It's a much longer and much funnier joke but that's the gist of it.

Re:Let's see

[jejones]

I agree with you in principle, though whoever eventually succeeds will find themselves accused of "cultural genocide"; vide the reactions to cochlear implants.

Re:Let's see

[swb]

Whether the docor was providing "hope" or sound medicine, I don't doubt that covering his ass was a major factor in his decision.

The biggest problem is that medicine generally is much more of a zero-sum financial game than people realize, and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on very old people with very complex health problems *and* terminal illnesses actually denies care to a lot of people.

It raises insurance premiums, which eliminates insurance has an option for many employers and classes of employees. It forces insurers to limit the access and types of care available. This latter issue is a big problem, because in many cases inferior medical care of the young leads to expensive complicated care for them whtn they're not so young, which only aggrevates the cost component.

I guess to some this all leads down the road to mercy killings and care denied based on diagnoses or age limits or something else out of a bad future movie, but at some point we really do have to ask ourselves about the costs and the benefits in medecine, as well as adjusting our attitude towards life and dying.

As long as "another day at any cost" remains a valid an acceptable mindset, we're in trouble.

Re:Hypocrit

[0xdeadbeef]

What part of ’ “ and ” don't you understand? While it may not work in old browsers, it is certainly standards-compliant, unlike the moronized quotes of Microsoft. I suppose you're making a joke. What is truly annoying is that Slashdot's comment system eats these unicode entity references. But then again, after three years they still haven't fixed the "plain text" and "extrans" mix-up, so what do you expect?

Begging the question

[wytcld]

Most of the modded-up responses so far are disrespectful. Certainly some sites should try to be accessible to various sorts of people with different assortments of sensory function. We have here some generous advice on how to do that.

So what's the dissing about? Maybe it has to do with my own reaction to the general notion that all the Web should be accessible to the disabled. Should we ruin the design of a site for 99 visitors just to make it more appealing to 1? Should ski resorts have to provide wheelchair accessible slopes? With the majority of our media currently focused on services for the mentally disabled, how much farther should we go? Is the ideal to produce a world in which everyone is equally crippled - or may as well be?

Those question aren't at issue here. We should be discussing how to make sites which desire to be accessible work. Right?

Re:Begging the question

[Hektor_Troy]

wytcld (179112) wrote:

We should be discussing how to make sites which desire to be accessiblework. Right?

Joe Clark wrote:

Seriously, if you've got an ordinary HTML Web page and you make absolutely all your images accessible - including, crucially, adding alt=""to every spacer GIF and every other meaningless graphic - you're four-fifths of the way to being an accessible Web site for the group with the greatest single need, the blind and visually-impaired.

Maybe we should be discussing reading the articles before commenting them. Just a thought.

All very interesting

[sielwolf]

The main problem with enforcing standards on the web is twofold. First, the web is very ad hoc. It isn't like television or telephone which is regulated by the government and maintained by singular utilities. Also it is inherently multimedia which means you can get some far out web designs that, although interesting in an art-installation sort of way, are in no ways easy to use.

Second is that the web is considered a secondary or tertiary source of information at best. I mean unless you are using it for periodicals or the like, the web is a lot of free-floating crap and ego-stroking. We all know that web access is a privelige and broadband is outright rare (beyond the geek-centric). Outside of Amazon and a few others, what companies actually do a bulk (or even a significant minority... say 10%) of their business online?

Of course some other natures of the Web make it perfect for the disabled: it is pull-media and electronic information that can be parsed (unlike say reading a newspaper or getting info at a mall kiosk).

But until internet access is as common as asphalt roads (which don't exist on probably 50% of inhabited areas) making demands of this fledgling tech is a bit much. Now should demands be made? Definitely. But can you expect reasonable results? Probably not.

Personally I'd rather see the government spend money on stemming the tide of AIDS and easily curable diseases in the 3rd world instead of worrying if memepool.com is standards compliant.

Re:All very interesting

[dvdeug]

the web is considered a secondary or tertiary source of information at best.

Not for a lot of things. A lot of people, especially in rural/sparsely populated areas, buy stuff through Amazon and like; it's both cheaper and easier than driving down to the city. It's a first source of information for most of us without an encyclopedia. Especially for the blind, the web can be a primary source of information; do you want to get someone to dig through a library's shelves for you for that obscure piece of information, or would you rather hit the web and have your screen reader read to you?

internet access is as common as asphalt roads (which don't exist on probably 50% of inhabited areas) making demands of this fledgling tech

"fledgling tech"? I see too many commericals on TV about Earthlink and .COM! (Yahoo commericals?) and various internet services to believe fledgling. And who doesn't have Internet access? Most people have a library nearby with internet terminals - I know Podunk (I mean, Alva), Oklahoma, with a population of 4300 does.

Yes, asphalt roads don't run up to McMurdo Base in Antartica. But Alva has them and so does every other small town I've seen. Maybe the 1% that live in the middle of nowwhere don't have asphalt roads, but those of us with electricity and running water have asphalt roads.

Personally I'd rather see the government spend money on stemming the tide of AIDS and easily curable diseases in the 3rd world instead of worrying if memepool.com is standards compliant.

Think of the children, eh? They aren't mutually exclusive, and memepool.com isn't a site that the government would worry about; it's commerical accommidation, not Joe Blow's website.

Re:LOL

[Xzzy]

> For God's sake, the question titles are bigger
> than the headline!

He addressed this in one of the questions, not directly but he kind of hinted at it: This is a problem with browser software, NOT the XHTML he submitted.

Your browser chose to draw that headline in a huge 72pt typeface, his XHTML didn't.

This reflects an inherent weakness in web browsers that's been around since netscape 1.1N.. users to not have sufficient control over the rendering of pages to achieve a visually pleasing display. It's been getting worse ever since, as web designers resort to more and more html hacks to try and strike a balance between pleasant design and varying browsers.

The original goal of HTML was to be a document "suggestion" format. Meaning a web page designer marked up his document in a way that a piece of client software could parse it, and order the final results in a way the reader wanted it. Since then, HTML has become more of a postscript type thing, where it's being forced to rigidly define what the user sees.

meta-information

[dallen]

Take a look at the source. There are a few things that intrigue me, and some that seem annoying.

He uses lots of "title" attributes in his links, which, in my browser (Mozilla 1.1), can only be read if I mouse over each and every link; I can't tab to them and see the meta information. Some of them seem pretty useful context info, unfortunately..

There's the "abbr" markup, such as: <abbr title="(audio) description">DX</abbr> which gets underlined in Mozilla, which is a neat tag I didn't know about, but also requires mousing over it and waiting a second for the meta info.

For some reason, punctuation characters are apparently turned into Unicode HTML elements, such as &#8217 for single-quote. I'd love to know why that's good standards.

offtopic, for just a sec...

[spazoid12]

"but variety is the spice of Slashdot"

that is pretty funny.

riiiight...

[jonr]

"..variety is the spice of Slashdot."
Yeah right!

I just have one question

[hardave]

This will probablly burn Karma, but oh well.

Joe Who??

For the moderators, this isn't a troll, it's just bad Canadian political humour, and I suppose I can understand you getting the two confused. Google for Joe Clark.

Re:I just have one question

[c13v3rm0nk3y]

Curses! I was going to make that clever post!

Mod the top post up. It's funny. Laugh!

Re:I just have one question

[MrResistor]

How exactly is one Progressive and Conservative at the same time? Is that the joke?

Re:VERY LARGE HEADLINES

[_prime]

The semantic meaning of the h1-h6 tags is more important than how you see them rendered on this page: any sort of code reader (including a search engine bot) will assign more importance to items blocked in proper heading tags. It's also the only way a code reader would know about a section heading given that simply making a heading bold or larger using the font tag would only indicate importance rather than a main heading.

I agree that the standard way web browsers render headings is unpleasant, but it's easy enough to make a heading look better. Use CSS to make them smaller and/or reduce the margins. This way you get the correct semantic markup and have them look the way you want.

Re:He's the Yin to Shatner's Yang

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Please don't talk about Shatner's yang.

How about allowing more formatting?

[tiltowait]

I had the same problem with CSS being stripped from a story I submitted. Yes there can be lameness-filter problems with allowing CSS, but the more Taco tightens his grip...

Harder than you think

[Second_Derivative]

There have been great strides in artificial eye technology: I think Slashdot even posted a link to a rudimentary artificial eye prototype already: the person with these artificial eyes percieves sight as flashes around the outlines of objects. It's amazing stuff and it's certainly an area of active research.

The main problem though is interfacing with the brain, and that's not an easy nut to crack. In particular, there is pretty much no hope at all for someone who is blind from birth; such people have a stunted visual cortex so even if they were given eagle eye artificial optics, it would be useless as their brains would be incapable of processing the information, so they wouldn't even understand the _concept_ of vision. I'd link to the story if I could find it, but suffice it to say it'll be quite some time before all forms of blindness can be eradicated.

And on the topic of vision concept, here's an idle thought: imagine if everything red looked green to you, everything green looked blue and everything blue looked red. How would you know that your perception of a given colour wasn't the same as someone else's? (answer: you can't. Think about it. Maybe this explains why some people have totally screwed up senses of aesthetics. Or in fact you could extend it further; how do you know that other people even 'see' the same way as you do? A few very rare people can see four primary colours. Imagine what THAT would feel like. But I've gone even further off topic now than I was originally...)

Re:Harder than you think

[dead sun]

Well, assuming we can get the people who are blind but once had vision to see again, what would stop us from giving these artificial eyes to the blind at birth? The brain would get visual information from the start (I don't think you build too much vision in the womb, could be wrong) and thus the areas of the brain responsible for vision would not underdeveloped. This, of course, offers no hope to those born blind before we can do this. Still, once the procedure is down for how to interface the things it should be possible. I would guess that inplants on infants would be tricky, since they can't give you meaningful feedback. However, there's no reason that brain activity couldn't be scanned to see that the hookup went well.

As for the idle thought, I fail to see how it matters in the least to those who would be given vision. In the case of those who are getting vision restored I'm sure some form of calibration must take place in order to get the colors right. For those who would be given vision who had never yet seen, they would learn what color is what for the first time, and would be just like anybody else. It is an interesting concept that I think many have pondered though. Luckily we're now advanced enough to state that light of a certain wavelength is a certain color, all that's up to debate is any given person's perception of it, which, I assume, would be slightly harder than trivial to calibrate through artificial eyes.

Re:Harder than you think

[pogen]

Well, assuming we can get the people who are blind but once had vision to see again, what would stop us from giving these artificial eyes to the blind at birth?

Hmmm... Well, newborns don't exactly pop out and tell you that they're blind. I'm not sure how easy it is to diagnose all forms of blindness when they're that young -- even healthy newborns can't see very well at first.

But more importantly, who's going to pay for it? In a world where so many people lack even basic medical coverage, I don't think this is a realistic solution. This sounds like it would be a very, very expensive procedure... And whatever the costs and limitations of improving accessibility, at least the benefits can be reaped more or less equally by all (i.e., not just those who are rich).

Then there is the fact that artificial eyes do not give you perfect or even average vision, and possibly never will. Even if you could magically provide working artificial eyes to all of the blind in the world, they will still need accessibility accomodations in order to be able to function with what will always be an inferior substitute for normal human vision.

Finally, even if artificial eyes could someday provide perfect vision, it would take a great deal of time to get there. Meanwhile, how many generations of blind people will be born, live out their lives, and die?

So no, I don't think that diverting attention and/or funds away from accessibility is a good idea.

But as long as we're talking about it, I might turn the tables and suggest that some of the money being used to research artificial eyes would be better spent on prevention of toxoplasmosis and other afflictions that cause many of these people to be born blind in the first place.

Re:Harder than you think

[dead sun]

I think you take my statements wrong, and that's probably my fault. I'm not suggesting that we take away all the funding for improving blind people's lives. I just think that it is a loftier goal to try to give vision rather than merely give people a way to cope without it. By no means am I suggesting we don't accomodate those without vision.

I'm sure there are probably a bunch of kinks that would need to be addressed in order to diagnose anybody as blind or not at birth. I'm certainly no eye doctor, but I'd hope there would be some way to check if a child had no response to visual stimuli. If there's some reaction then I would think that there would be some development in the brain geared towards vision. Again, I could be wrong on that, but it sounds right to me.

But more importantly, who's going to pay for it? In a world where so many people lack even basic medical coverage, I don't think this is a realistic solution. This sounds like it would be a very, very expensive procedure... And whatever the costs and limitations of improving accessibility, at least the benefits can be reaped more or less equally by all (i.e., not just those who are rich).

Well, I think you probably hit it on the head as to who's going to be covering at least the research costs. My guess is that the rich with blind children, or the rich who had some accident will be the first to reap the benefit of said technology. While it certainly isn't the best basis of forming a line, one would hope that the technology could become affordable enough to be a procedure which is routinely done. If the artificial eyes are even close to average vision then I'm sure it could take a large chunk of future costs away as well, not to mention grant some form of sight. As such perhaps benevolent governments, wealthy individuals, or another third party might help subsidize the costs. I don't know how much time, effort, or money goes into teaching the blind to function in society, but I'm guessing it is fairly large. I would imagine that niceties like seeing eye dogs and the like are expensive as well, not to mention require special training. These are areas that would be lessened in cost or eliminated with artificial eyes. Plus people who have lost their vision wouldn't have such shock when being placed in society, and with enough evolution of the technology, could probably keep their normal jobs.

I have no doubt that it will take a long time to get to the point where we can replace people's vision. I have no doubt that at least a couple generations of the blind will come and go before the technology is near perfect. But let me stress again that I don't think we should make these people's lives worse while we're working on it. I do think, however, and it is likely the case with most things, that pouring too much money in one area does nothing. If more money is made available for the advancement of the blind then perhaps it wouldn't hurt to try to take this avenue.

To bring the whole thing back on topic I think it's great that standards are emerging that will allow better access to the disabled online. Just reading the interview I've been thinking of little changes I can make to my own personal site that would be for the better. Like alt tags, those would be easy.

Lastly, maybe some money from artificial eye research should be put into preventative measures. Things like toxoplasmosis seem to be relatively easy to avoid if you're aware they exist, I'm not sure exactly what else causes blindness at birth though. Perhaps it would be best to encourage family doctors to discuss these things if they're preventable. That solution doesn't help people blinded later in life though. I think the more routes that are being worked on the better. I'd rather see poorly than not at all, though for those who can't see I think we should do what we can to help them out.

Re:LOL

[proj_2501]

Have you noticed that the interview still has its tags included? Way to go!

Re:VERY LARGE HEADLINES

[0x0d0a]

The *entire point* is that it *isn't* too large. Your *client* may well preset it as too large, but his XHTML file is entirely correct -- written as HTML was supposed to be written. Not with all this invisible table and forced positioning and crap forced through with CSS and stuff like that.

Re:You should have removed the tag!

[wsapplegate]

> but you guys should at least have removed the [...] tags from his document. It is extremely bad form to insert a whole html document inside another one.

Huuuuhhh... You're talking about Slashdot, the website for standards-loving geeks and nerds who doesn't even validate (and note that they've forbidden entry to validator.w3.org to hide the fact). In comparison, another site where I dwell, LinuxFR; not only validates but doesn't use old-fashioned table-based layouts, ditched in favor of more modern and user-customisable floating layers. To this day, I'm still ashamed at the sheer number of sites (even Linux/OSS/Free Software ones) that don't even do the minimum to be good netizens : provide an error-free site with a DOCTYPE that triggers standards-compliance mode in browsers. I shouldn't maybe draw conclusions too fast (some of these sites could still use non-standards-compliant middleware like ad banners generators and the like. I believe I remember Wired's Douglas Bowman said this were the major cause hampering efforts towards compliance) but I think the main problem lies with the laziness and the usual if it works with IE, it works nearly everywhere state of mind. And you can throw all the blows and whistles you want into your new shiny standards to attract followers, you cannot overcome laziness... *sigh*

ARRRRGGGGHHHH!

[0x0d0a]

as long as you don't care about the little things (like font size, positioning, etc.) across multiple browsers

No *kidding*. The *point* of HTML is that the author should *not* care or try to force a font size on the end user -- the end user should be free to choose whatever's most convenient for them.

Unfortunately, the market got flooded with "web designers" who came straight from print magazines or got all their ideas from print magazines.

Re:ARRRRGGGGHHHH!

[pacc]

The *point* of HTML is that the author should *not* care or try to force a font size on the end user

I agree, and since the end-user is slashdot they should have made some effort in getting a CSS stylesheet since that's the part that is their job.

Re:ARRRRGGGGHHHH!

[zerocool^]

No *kidding*. The *point* of HTML is that the author should *not* care or try to force a font size on the end user -- the end user should be free to choose whatever's most convenient for them.

Unfortunately, the market got flooded with "web designers" who came straight from print magazines or got all their ideas from print magazines.

Hi-Ho, a trolling we go, eh?

Look, I'll make this very simple. Plain text webpages are ugly. XHTML compatable pages are ugly. HTML 1.1 compatable pages are ugly. Leaving the border around your image link is ugly. Not using tables is ugly.

Why do you think people hire webdesigners? Because they know how to create an eye catching site. Why do you think magazines look like they look? Because, through trial and error, they have found what works.

People want webpages to seem alive. People want an interactive web. This is something that's a foreign concept to most linux users: You are all used to seeing pages like CGIwrap's webpage that is an assault to the eyes at the expense of being compatable with all browsers including lynx and mosaic. Or, you might get as advanced as the apache webpage which is not as much an assault on the senses, but is still boring.

I don't care what this loser says, he needs to get out of the ninteys and give people what they want. It's all about target marketing. Linux geeks are content to see pages like the cgi-wrap page. HOWEVER, normal people are impressed by things that move, things that make noise, things that interact. You're suggesting we should give people a bycicle because it'll get them from a to b and it's easy to use. But there will always be a market for flashy sport compacts, and if you ignore these people in favor of backwards compatability, you're going to alienate a good section of the population.

Take a look, for example, at the 2 Advanced Studios webpage. Tell me you've seen a cooler webpage, and I'll tell you you're lying. Or, take a look at some of the work they've done.

Making a good looking, interactive page, with javascript menus, flash animations, etc, means "I have taken an interest in my work, and I care what it looks like". Some of you may have seen his XHTML bullshit at the top of this page and thought, "Oh, wow, this guy is great. This page is so readable, and so well organized." But, what most of the rest of us that live in reality said was "Jesus, that's aweful. It looks like he made it with an old copy of Frontpage 98 that was included with his windows 98 install". It looks aweful.

For example, this guy is claiming that flash intros suck. Some of them do, but done right, it definately adds to the "wow" factor of the website. And the "wow" factor makes you money, or gets you accolades, not the "this will work in every browser ever, including my cell phone and my command line" factor.

Get with the times. There are graphic designs artists and webpage designers for a reason. The reason is because they know how to make a page look better than you do.

This guy's just a douche that's to stupid to smell the change and know he's obsolete. People like him are the reason it's ok to have a website that looks like shit, and I say I've had enough.

~Will

Re:ARRRRGGGGHHHH!

[0x0d0a]

Plain text webpages are ugly.

You may have your client set up to render them in an ugly manner -- if you like the soft gray on a dark blue with techish fonts of the site you linked to, you can certainly tell your browser to do that.

XHTML compatable pages are ugly.

That is simply inane. XHTML is not particularly far from HTML. If your entire body of knowledge about XHTML comes from the above article, you're probably under a few misconceptions -- the guy used XHTML as it *should* (and HTML *should*) be used. You can covert Flashy Website Foo to XHTML easily.

HTML 1.1 compatable pages are ugly.

HTML is very heavily designed around being backwards compatible. So if your pages don't work with an HTML 1.1 browser, it's quite probable that you're doing something that doesn't fit with the *current* spec.

Leaving the border around your image link is ugly.

Actually, it's simply removing a source of information from the user -- one that they could remove themselves if they wanted to.

Not using tables is ugly.

Tables as tables are fine -- the problem is that very, very few tables on most GUI-tool-designed-websites are actually tables of data.

Why do you think people hire webdesigners?

Because they know they "need a website", want to market their company more, and don't have a clue what to do from there.

Because they know how to create an eye catching site.

For an artsy-type site, this might be reasonable. For most sites, though, I'm not randomly browsing the Web with the sole criteria of whether I look at a site being how "cool" it looks. It certainly doesn't drive me to come back to see what the webmaster has been doing to the site. Usually I'm looking for something -- news, when Daylight Savings Time starts, how many DIMMs a motherboard can take, whether my library has a given book.

When I go to fordvehicles.com, I'm not looking for a random "interactive movie" -- I want to know where I can find a dealership. I want to know what features are on this year's models. I'm not saying to myself "Hmm...where can I find a moving interface laden with lots of little movie transitions...oh, I know! I'll try fordvehicles.com...and while I'm there, if I like it enough, maybe I'll buy a car!"

Why do you think magazines look like they look?

It depends on the magazine. Look at, say, Forbes. You won't see goth text, purple backdrops, or pseudo-metal rims on the page edges.

Also, magazines are a "push" medium. My subscription comes to me, and I get it. I'm usually not looking for a particular piece of information, nor am I usually in a rush to get that data -- I'm reading in the bathroom or while waiting for my lunch to arrive.

Websites are a "pull" medium. I'm looking for data, and the more screwing around I have to do with some moving, jiggling, unusual interface, the harder it is for me to get what I'm looking for.

People want webpages to seem alive.

Perhaps you do. I can live without my text organically pulsing.

People want an interactive web.

Sure, there are times when interactivity can be handy. Slashdot lets me click "select all" to mark messages for deletion, for example. There are also times when it's entirely pointless and irritating, like menus that popup unbidden when I simply pass the mouse over them.

You are all used to seeing pages like CGIwrap's webpage [cgiwrap.com] that is an assault to the eyes at the expense of being compatable with all browsers including lynx and mosaic.

Actually, I find this website to be rather clean and easy to navigate.

Or, you might get as advanced as the apache webpage [apache.org] which is not as much an assault on the senses, but is still boring.

Still pretty decent.

I don't care what this loser says,

Oh.

he needs to get out of the ninteys and give people what they want.

I'm you on the "what they want" bit, though I suspect that "what they want" may be a bit different.

It's all about target marketing.

Um...all right.

Linux geeks are content to see pages like the cgi-wrap page.

Yup.

HOWEVER, normal people are impressed by things that move, things that make noise, things that interact.

"Normal people" are two year olds? Sure, there was some novelty when Flash first came out, but the model that was being proposed in the early days of web design (that people would "keep coming back to your site to see your improvements") simply didn't pan out. Content is what draws people and builds a lasting interest. Cheap novelty just gets in the way after people got familiar with the Web.

You're suggesting we should give people a bycicle because it'll get them from a to b and it's easy to use. But there will always be a market for flashy sport compacts, and if you ignore these people in favor of backwards compatability, you're going to alienate a good section of the population.

Bit of a loaded metaphor. I'd consider what I'm proposing to be more usable and powerful than what you are.

Take a look, for example, at the 2 Advanced Studios [2advanced.com] webpage. Tell me you've seen a cooler webpage, and I'll tell you you're lying.

Well, let's see. They've got a big page with no useful information or links at startup (sorry, perhaps it comes up with Flash, but like many people that have gotten tired of the Web playing movies and sounds at them, I've disabled Flash). There's a nice big "site requrements" page, implying that someone would actually upgrade either their browser, their plugin, their *processor*, or change their monitor/bit depth to use the website. That, frankly, smacks of unprofessionalism -- failing to cater to the user. It looks to me rather like a teenage hobbyist web designer's page.

Or, take a look at some [spacex.com] of the work [westonfl.org] they've done [fordvehicles.com].

All of which come up as broken embed icons to me, since I don't use Flash. Even with people that do use Flash, instability has long been a hallmark of webbrowsers rendering Flash -- this may have changed in the last two years or so, but I haven't really paid much attention.

Making a good looking, interactive page, with javascript menus, flash animations, etc, means "I have taken an interest in my work, and I care what it looks like".

Actually, the end user isn't looking for that sentiment at all, and hasn't remotely considered the web designer or HTML or anything like that. He's thinking "where's what I'm looking for?" Put in Javascript menus and you alienate people like my sister, who has a slow computer, my parents, who can't get comfortable with things *happening* when they simply move the mouse around to go elsewhere, me (who hates mouseless rollovers and Flash).

Some of you may have seen his XHTML bullshit at the top of this page and thought, "Oh, wow, this guy is great. This page is so readable, and so well organized." But, what most of the rest of us that live in reality said was "Jesus, that's aweful. It looks like he made it with an old copy of Frontpage 98 that was included with his windows 98 install". It looks aweful.

And so it should have Javascript menus and be significantly less navigable?

For example, this guy is claiming that flash intros suck.

Yup, nothing like waiting through a 15 second intro to see a website to improve usability.

Some of them do, but done right, it definately adds to the "wow" factor of the website. And the "wow" factor makes you money, or gets you accolades, not the "this will work in every browser ever, including my cell phone and my command line" factor.

The end user doesn't give a shit about accolades, any more than he does what marketing awards were given to the guy that designed the Viewsonic logo when he buys his monitor.

As for money -- you know what two of the most heavily used websites in the world are? Google and Yahoo. You know what? Both are fairly simple and minimalistic. You know what else? They beat out their competition, which put tons of sidebars, tables, and all sorts of crap in on their pages during the portal craze. Google is a great example of what I'm talking about. People what their information, and they don't want to screw around getting it. The dot coms that assumed people did because "conventional wisdom" said they did are all dead now. Maybe a bored 12-year-old at school gets a few moments of interest out of the bitmapped Javascript menus that you put so much stock in. I can guarantee you that the working adult is not interested in blowing an extra ten minutes on a website when he's looking for something, though.

Get with the times. There are graphic designs artists and webpage designers for a reason. The reason is because they know how to make a page look better than you do.

My entire point is that I *shouldn't* dictate what the page looks like. The *user* should be able to do that. I should be able to dictate the content in it. If the user likes that soft gray tech look on midnight blue that you seem to favor, that can be done. If the user doesn't see too well, the font can be enlarged (which *cannot* be done with your bitmapped interfaces, but *can* on the single site you were insulting). This is not 1% of the population -- most 50+ish year olds I've seen end up increasing the font size well above what I use, or squint at the screen. Same for blind/deaf/WebTV/Linux/MacOS/alternative browser users/cell users...

This guy's just a douche that's to stupid to smell the change and know he's obsolete. People like him are the reason it's ok to have a website that looks like shit, and I say I've had enough.

Ah.

Re:ARRRRGGGGHHHH!

[0x0d0a]

What exactly is a table for, if not page layout? As far as I can see, the only purpose of a table is to define the physical relationship of different pieces of content.

Tables do have that attribute, mostly because it's very difficult for a browser to do much else with them.

Tables are the proper way to present an "array" of information. The table paradigm *does* happen to let the designer specify the ordering of columns, for example. Some sacrifices have to be made to allow joined cells. :-) But there really is nothing preventing web browser designers from allowing users to reorder columns from the specified order, as long as they don't have joined cells. This could be a useful feature if you only care about, say, three numbers (car price, name, and top speed), and want to move those columns in a big table to the far left of the table for easy comparison.

So in this case, I'm not defining physical relationship of different pieces of content -- tables were just a convenient way to embed that information and provide a "suggested" viewing order. :-)

Pareto's 80-20 law

[briancnorton]

I'd like to know how to overcome Pareto's 80-20 law. It states that 20% of ones time will be spent accomplishing 80% of a goal, and the rest to fill in the remaining 20% If I can cut out 80% of my development time by eliminating unneeded features like accessibility (hear me out) Im going to. I say that accessibility is unneeded, but I mean that there is a good quantity of information available that may be narrated, but would not convey the same information as a visual counterpart. Is there a need to make the Guggenheim museum narrate that that "starry night" is a picture of a nighttime sky and skyline in an impressionist style." What is a disabled user going to take away from that? While I whole heartedly agree that online taxpayer funded services should be accessible, I cant see any need for a photo album to include alt tags, or a movie to be narrated, or a flash animation to include audio cues. For the most part however I think that the money spent on these items would be far better spent on curing blindness. I have no doubt in my mind that that will happen before half the web is accessible.

Use Validators and Load Generators to Test WebApps

[MichaelCrawford]

I couldn't quite fit the title in the space allowed for the subject.

One of the most important things that you need to do to make a website accessible is to use valid markup. This is also important to allow interoperability with standards-based browsers like Opera and Mozilla.

You can ensure your site has valid markup by using a validator to check your HTML. You will find that you have an easier time writing valid markup after working with a validator for a few pages, after that you'll find very few mistakes, and they will be easy to fix. Don't let the validator's complaints about your first attempts scare you.

Maintaining server responsiveness while under heavy user load is important for basic usability for any user. You can test how your application responds to heavy traffic by testing with a load generator.

Please read:

• Use Validators and Load Generators to Test Your Web Applications

Thank you for your attention.

Other way around

[0x0d0a]

HTML *used* to be perfectly accessable. It was *beautifully* designed so that anyone could use it. It's with all the new layout-oriented stuff that people start being made miserable -- some browsers can't display some sites properly, blind/deaf people are put at a disadvantage, you need a fair amount of CPU time just to browse web pages.

Apostrophes

[Fruit]

I notice that Joe Clark consistently uses a single closing quote (') as an apostrophe in his text. Now I know this is common practice in the typesetting business, but aren't those two characters conceptually different symbols?

Wouldn't it be better--and easier--to use the simple ASCII apostrophe (') instead?

Re:Apostrophes

[dvdeug]

Now I know this is common practice in the typesetting business, but aren't those two characters conceptually different symbols?

No; they're the same symbol used two different ways.

Wouldn't it be better--and easier--to use the simple ASCII apostrophe (') instead?

Easier, yes. But the Unicode apostrophe is unified with the single closing quote, and the ASCII apostrophe is basically deprecated.

Re:Apostrophes

[dvdeug]

Yep, this is an example of someone disliking the look of the "correct" glyph (the apostrophe, or ' ) and choosing to use a totally different character instead (the right single-quote) because it looks more appropriate.

No. As noted by the AC below,

U+0027 APSOTROPHE is the most commonly used character for apostrophe. However, it has ambiguous semantics and direction. When text is set, U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK is preferred as apostrophe. Word processors commonly offer a facility for automatically converting the U+0027 APOSTROPHE to a contextually-selected curly quotation glyph.
-Unicode Standard

The ASCII apostrophe is basically deprecated in Unicode; it's used for at least five different other characters in Unicode, so they decided just to replace it completely.

Re:Apostrophes

[dvdeug]

I know what the current Unicode recommendation is. I just wonder why they recommend it.

As you said, this is common practice in the typesetting business. Unicode is not in the practice of making typesetting policy; furthermore, Unicode tries not to seperate characters by function unless they're clearly distinct characters. The Latin 'o' and the Cyrillic 'o' get seperate codepoints because they're in different scripts.

Re:Parking Spaces

[Photon Ghoul]

That's not even in the least bit funny. How about I come over, chop off your legs, gouge out your eyes and destroy your eardrums, then we can talk?

Curly vs. straight quotes.

[lordpixel]

I probably can't actually demonstrate it to you because the Slashcode will filter them out (LAME), but what he's doing is using curly rather than straight quotes.

There are three single quotes and three double quotes common on most computers. Good old ' and " which are straight, and the much nicer to look at curly or "smart" quotes (see MS Word, or the post above).

I think &rdquo; would make a right double quote if Slashdot allowed me to enter one.

Many people edit their HTML text in Word or some other editor which automatically inserts curly quotes. However, you'll often see a problem if the article writer has a Mac and you have a PC, or vice versa. All of the "smart" curly quotes get converted to meaingless codes like this: it?s. This is because the curly quotes aren't in the 7-bit (0..127) ASCII range, rather they're either Microsoft or Apple 8-bit (0..255) extensions, which are different.

In order to avoid that happening to anyone he's using Unicode escapes which specify the character precisely. Ultimately, it wouldn't really be necessary if people used better tools to edit HTML, or used Unicode aware editors and had their web server mark the pages as Unicode when served.

Re:Curly vs. straight quotes.

[Fastolfe]

This is because the curly quotes aren't in the 7-bit (0..127) ASCII range, rather they're either Microsoft or Apple 8-bit (0..255) extensions, which are different.

Or Unicode.

A lot of the "it?s" problems would go away if Slashdot would simply declare a character set for its pages instead of letting the user agent make a bad assumption. I've suggested this a few times but it's never happened.

They could even go a step further and standardize on UTF-8, which would let us be entirely multilingual, with Japanese articles, Chinese comments, etc. It's arguable if that's even necessary or desirable on Slashdot, but why force everyone to use ISO-8859-1 (which, by the way, does not contain those "smart quotes").

All it takes is a single line in the HTML document:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

Re:Curly vs. straight quotes.

[dvdeug]

Here's what I could find: [a list of names of Unicode characters]

The name of a Unicode character never tells you everything about it. In this instance, Apostrophe is merely a legacy backlash - if you were reading the standard (available for free at the Unicode website), you would see the note below apostrophe noting this, and the note below the single right quote noting that it was the real apostrophe.

Re:Use your own advice

[runderwo]

And it'd be a more productive use of your time to not try to change everyone who isn't satisfied with what Slashdot has evolved into.

Sorry, but it's a matter of the signal to noise ratio. If you go to alt.microsoft and start yelling about how everyone who posts on alt.microsoft sucks and how the newsgroup is completely useless, at the very least you're going to get killfiled, and possibly blocked from posting by your ISP. This is because alt.microsoft was created for disseminating relevant information and for on-topic discussion, not to hear the mindless rambling of trolls who had nothing better to do.

Just because Slashdot uses moderation instead of outright censorship doesn't mean that anti-Slashdot trolling is somehow useful to people who read Slashdot for content and on-topic discussion. In fact, it's a mind-numbing distraction, and my appeal for the idiocy to stop still stands.

Variety is the spice of Slashdot...

[telstar]

...until the same story gets posted 3 or 4 times.

Re:LOL

[Cutriss]

I feel this may be in part due to culture clashes between programmers and artists.

I have a friend who will be receiving her art degree in the next week, and recently she's been doing a lot of work with Flash and Cold Fusion. On the one hand, I really like her Flash applets, but on the other hand, she always puts them in a popup window, with the webpage itself being just a loader. It's annoying as hell, because her Flash apps were always of reasonably small size, something on the order of 400x300. There are other issues I have with them too, but I won't address those here.

I asked her why she didn't just load the applet in the page itself, and she barked at me, claiming that she did so to retain control of how the app looks. She didn't want any ugly toolbars or whatnot that she had no control over clashing with her design.

I tried to talk to her about HCI concepts and the idea of presenting information in a creative way without interfering with what the user wants, but she'd have absolutely none of it. To suggest such a thing was tantamount to restricting her creative control.

Personally, I thought it was rather presumptuous. Yes, a computer is a tool, but ultimately, it's still a computer, and you have to respect the boundaries of functionality when it comes to designing things to run on a PC.

So, to put it bluntly, I'm starting to believe that the problem isn't that Slashdot readers don't understand W3C/WAI standards or good markup practices - It's that the programmers aren't the ones doing the webpages.

Utterly laughable, Slashdot editors miss point

[lordpixel]

OK, so let's look at this XHTML compliant document shall we?

Do a view source, look at the first coupld of lines, which is the same ordinary "start of page" you're going to find on every page on Slashdot:

"<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN">
<html><head><title>Slashdot | Joe Clark's Answers -- In Valid XHTML</title>"

See how it claims to be HTML 3.2. Not XHTML at all.

So now we page down 3-4 times.... now we see this:

<p>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transition al.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;
charset=iso-8859-1" />
<title>Ask the Expert: Accessibility</title>
</head>
<body>

Hilarious. So this guy sent them a complete, well-formatted XHTML document, and they pasted it into a

tag in the middle of a regular Slashdot page.

What exactly was that supposed to achieve? How stupid do you have to be?

At the very least they could have stripped out the and tags, because as it is they now have a document with *nested* html, and body elemements, and 2 head elements. This is illegal in every version of HTML that's ever existed.

Utterly utterly missing the point!

Even worse, Slashdot's Plain Old Text mode doesn't even let me paste that HTML in. I have to go through by hand and manually escape each and every < and > into &lt; and &gt; . What's the point of a plain text mode that doesn't know how to escape stuff for me. I can't just type Plain Old Text - instead I have to know all about escape codes and enter them myself?

Re:Utterly laughable, Slashdot editors miss point

[Trogre]

"What's the point of a plain text mode that doesn't know how to escape stuff for me. I can't just type Plain Old Text - instead I have to know all about escape codes and enter them myself?"

I thought that was the point of "Extrans" mode.

CSS

[decathexis]

Many people have complained about the fact that the posted XHTML response looks "ugly". I don't see how you can blame XHTML for this. I thought Slashdot editors would have figured out how to slap 3 lines of CSS on top of Joe Clark's XHTML, which would make it fit with Slashdot style while preserving 100% of accessibility. That's what the separation of content and presentation is all about.

Instead, they left it anadourned so that it clashes with the rest of the site and provides them with a pathetic excuse for continuing using font and table tags instead of semantic markup. Whatever.

Semantic model for web pages

[rossjudson]

Sounds like this may be needed. Note that this is not the same as having a semantic model for the web itself. Clark talks about having various parts of a web page -- the search dialog, various navigation panes, and so forth. With a proper, extensible, and well defined semantic model for essential web page characteristics that could be acted on by rule bases that can tune and alter the resulting web page for a particular user, rearranging content and presentation to suit.

Re:Semantic model for web pages

[Fastolfe]

Look forward to more of this in XHTML 2.0!

I'm partly deaf, and I don't get accessible movies

[Buran]

Ok, instead of complaining about the bad HTML in the story, try this:

In the response to the question of accessibility and the law governing it, the answer includes: "it is not reasonable to expect disabled people to go somewhere else to get the same information or enjoy the same experience."

If that is the case, then why is it apparently OK for a movie theater to fail to provide subtitled films? I have never once been able to walk into a theater on a given day and say "I'm deaf and I need subtitles on this film." Yet, adding subtitles is trivial especially with more films being produced digitally or even projected digitally. The technology is right there under their noses, and it's commonplace on TV now. It's been required in new TVs since 1990.

Yet the theaters seem to think it's reasonable to tell me to wait til a film hits DVD so I can turn on captions or subtitles. I'm sorry, but that doesn't cut it. Telling me I have to wait while telling the person with normal hearing next to me that they can see the film Right Now If You Buy A Ticket is inexcusable.

Oh, and those audio assist headphones you're probably about to tell me about in your reply? They don't work for the completely deaf or those who already wear hearing aids. Like me. Sorry, do not pass Go, try again.

Wehrenberg, one of the two chains in my area, offers a few open captioned films, but not on any date, not in any theater, and by far not the films I want to see. I want LOTR. I want Insurrection. I want Die Another Day. I want Harry Potter. I've never heard of Truth about Charlie or Red Dragon.

Please, write in and tell 'em it's inexcusable.

Wehrenberg Theatres
1215 Des Peres Road
St. Louis, MO 63131
USA

American Multi Cinema
2049 Century Park East Suite 1020
Los Angeles, CA 90067
USA

Re:VERY LARGE HEADLINES

[JebusIsLord]

No, CSS is the way to do it properly. Using the FONT tag is incorrect since it uses HTML for formatting. Using CSS to format is recommended.

Re:I'm partly deaf, and I don't get accessible mov

[spakka]

I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

It's spelled 'deaf'

Re:LOL

[Fweeky]

For God's sake, the question titles are bigger than the headline!

Yes, because it's basically an entire standalone XHTML documented copied and pasted into the site (probably one of the most retarded things I've seen SlashDot do).

All those headings are <h1>'s, which SlashDot should be using for the site logo (with images off, in lynx, screenreaders, etc, it'll be rendered as a main heading), with a <h2> for the headlines, and so those questions should be <h3>.

If SlashDot used these more semantic tags, and Roblimo was smart enough to transform the document properly (h1 -> h3, and rip off the HTML pre/postamble), it'd look great, and the stylesheet SlashDot should be using to provide all this style would make it fit in perfectly.

Quick example of the sort of markup SlashDot uses, compared with what it should be using:

Here's the headline to this story:

<table WIDTH="100%" BORDER="0" CELLPADDING="0" CELLSPACING="0"><tr><td
VALIGN="TOP" BGCOLOR="#006666"><img
SRC="//images.slashdot.org /slc.gif" WIDTH="13" HEIGHT="16" ALT="" ALIGN="TOP"><font
FACE="arial,helvetica" SIZE="4" COLOR="#FFFFFF"><b>Joe Clark's Answers -- In Valid XHTML</b></font></td>
</tr></table>

Compare with what it *would* be in a design using CSS:

<h2>Joe Clark's Answers -- In Valid XHTML</h2>

Plus about 6 lines of CSS which you only load once, and much of which could be shared among other similar looking elements.

Much too elegent for SlashDot though. After all, if it doesn't look great in Netscape 4 it's not worth doing! :P

Re:I'm sorry, I would have written a SHORTER lette

[JebusIsLord]

the EM tag is what you should be using, for emphasis. 2 letters :)

Am I the only one?

[dadragon]

Am I the only one who read the title and thought: "What does /. want with Joe Clark, the Canadian politician?

Joe Clark is the leader of the Canadian Progressive Conservative party (Torys), for you non-Canadians.

Re:Am I the only one?

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

I was thinking of "Crazy" Joe Clark from Lean On Me. I think he's doing security work now.

Well, who knows

[autopr0n]

IMO, CSS is generaly better looking then Table stuff, but table stuff can look nice, and CSS can look fugly (just look at the W3C's CSS page!).

Of course at this point, any change would be great

my absolute favorite....

[Lumpy]

... Unless you have an airtight reason (like you're stuck using an old content-management system you cannot afford to replace), I really don't want to have anything to do with you unless you'reproducing valid HTML....

this is the phrase that needs to be said by EVERY hiring manager for every web design firm on the planet. 90% of all the problems with accessability are because of LAZY webdesigners not adhering to HTML standard and producing VALID html. And no, Microsoft IE specific is NOT valid HTML.... I dont see it mentioned anywhere in the HTML spec.

Validation is not a panacea

[Fweeky]

It's very easy to make a page which validates perfectly but which uses completely pathetic markup making it less accessable than even a tables based tag soup design like SlashDot.

Concider:

<div class="heading">This is my document heading</div>
<div class="para">And this is my body text. It's <span class="bold">valid</span> and <span class="bold">well-formed</span>, but the markup is a joke -- just imagine trying to read it if the stylesheet doesn't load!</div>
<div class="para">And sadly, this sort of "div-soup" design accounts for a significant proportion of CSS-based designs. Some even used spans instead; of div's, resulting in a page that, without CSS, is one long line of text!</div>

This is the HTML equivilent of writing a C application and putting absolutely everything in main(). Sure, it'll compile, but do you want to be the one to maintain it?

Usability != good looks

[autopr0n]

If the slashdot 'editors' spent 2 minutes writing a few lines of CSS in some between some tags it would have looked fine. Obviously that was beyond them. Because they are stupid idiots.

Well...

[autopr0n]

You should have just told her that you blocked popups, and thus couldn't see her applets. You can still tell her a lot of people do that, and that a lot of people won't even be able to turn stuff off

I really don't see why people fuss about stuff like that (toolbars and the like). It's not like people consider that part of the 'art'. I mean, I still have this ugly monitor frame around her work, no matter what.

Of course...

[jpsowin]

At Rob's site, he says:

"I belong to the Online News Association, Internet Press Guild, and Society of Professional Journalists, in case that matters to anyone. I am an excellent copy editor and proofreader, and I could easily edit CmdrTaco's and Hemos's writing into Perfect English, but I like them both just as they are. Indeed, I believe their (as I often call it) "unique approach to the English language" is partially responsible for Slashdot's success. (More on that in my book.)"

Whatever.

Re:Eye sores

[CoolVibe]

That's not that person's fault bub. Your beef should be with the slashdot webmasters, who could make his answers readable with some simple CSS.

The thing is that the XHTML has _NO_ formatting/styling at all, it's dominated by what's around it, and sitting snugly in place.

Blame Rob, not Joe.

Re:Parking Spaces

[Photon Ghoul]

The hostility wasn't real. I was simply trying to get a point across - that poor attempts at humor at the expense of others misfortune is disgusting and there would be a very sweet irony out of people making that sort of humor experiencing the misfortune themselves. (No, I don't think anything is necessarily sacred when it comes to humor, either.)

I used my +1 and didn't post anonymously because I am not a coward and don't mind taking the moderating down.

Re:I'm partly deaf, and I don't get accessible mov

[dvdeug]

If that is the case, then why is it apparently OK for a movie theater to fail to provide subtitled films?

I would say that's over the line for reasonable accomidation. A store can provide ramps without hurting other user's experiences; a webpage can provide accessability without hurting other user's experiences; but to add subtitles calls for either negatively influencing everyone else's view of the movie, or running a seperate movie -- the later of which may not even be economically possible.

Wehrenberg, one of the two chains in my area, offers a few open captioned films, but not on any date, not in any theater, and by far not the films I want to see.

Then complain to them. I don't know how they select the films, but every reasonable buisness listens to complaining customers. Maybe there's economic reasons they can't run Lord of the Rings; or maybe the manager is treating this as his own private best of the bunch and just needs a little nudging from upper management.

Re:I'm partly deaf, and I don't get accessible mov

[Buran]

... but to add subtitles calls for either negatively influencing everyone else's view of the movie ...

Not the way the most common system works -- Mr. Clark kindly sent me an email with a few links in it. (Thanks again!)

Here's the company that does a lot of this:

http://www.mopix.org

It's done with a screen showing captions in the back of the theater, in reverse. You view 'em with a reflecting mirror. If you don't have a reflector, you don't see a thing.

Then complain to them.

I plan on it -- and included their addresses so others can write, too.

Re:Percentage...

[autopr0n]

Rleibman: A member of the 1%

What, the bottom 1%? You obviously don't understand anything about HTML and web technology. You don't even seem to really understand what the "net" is.

Making websites accessible to begin with doesn't cost anything.

Re:VERY LARGE HEADLINES

[Fastolfe]

They are, but keep in mind Clark's responses were given in a stand-alone XHTML document. If Slashdot were doing their site correctly, they would have

1. been using things like <h1> .. <h6> to begin with, and would have defined CSS styles (if needed) so that they looked normal with respects to the rest of the site to begin with; and
2. only used a portion of Clark's XHTML responses (so as not to embed one XHTML document within another), and hopefully would have reduced his <h1> tags to <h2> or <h3> to fit within the semantic structure of the site

So no, really, Clark did not intend for his answers to appear this way, but it isn't really his fault. He gave his responses in a beautifully marked-up XHTML document, and Slashdot chose to use his document as-is without any further work to make it "fit". It's not Clark's job to do Slashdot's site design, but it was his decision to give Slashdot good, quality, semantic markup of his responses.

The point is, if Slashdot were using HTML like it was designed, Clark's answers would have integrated beautifully into the site.

"Text-only" correct link (Was: Re:Broken Link)

[Creosote]

The last digit was missing from the URL. The correct link is http://infocentre.frontend.com/servlet/Infocentre? access=no&page=article&rows=5&id=286

Re:Hypocrit

[Fastolfe]

Entities like map to Unicode code points. These can safely be used regardless of the character set declared in the document. Charsets change the meaning of the bytes used in the text of a page. HTML entities are separate from that and map directly to characters.

The fact that Slashdot isn't declaring a character set for its pages is a completely separate issue (and one I think they should definitely fix), but whatever they decide to use, will always map to the same character.

PSTN

[mmol_6453]

It's called the Public Switched Telephone Network, though its name doesn't do it much justice now.

It got its name from being a publicly available way of connecting two wires from one house to another, without laying wires from each house to each house.

There are some interesting advantages and disadvantages to that. I'll probably write it up in my journal.

Re:Use your own advice

[runderwo]

Perfectly on-topic and factual posts are modded down, if they don't fit the readers mindset. Completely infactual, outright lies and trolls are modded up if they're pro- linux.

You can be cynical all you want, but you'll have to point out said posts if you really want to make your point, instead of generalizing about it. When you generalize, at worst it makes you look like you're trolling, and at best it serves no useful purpose towards the end you would like to meet (a less biased Slashdot, I presume).

And I'll point out to others as oft as I feel appropriate, that the information and discussion they are hearing is from an overwhelmingly biased, cult-like following, who definately arent above stretching the truth to make a point.

I'm just not seeing the "overwhelming" bias part. For example, USA Today is a liberally slanted piece of news; it gets slammed left and right for that. But from its own readership? Hardly. Its readers read it because they know its reporters share their interests. If someone reads USA Today and doesn't like their slant (while being unable to refute them on a factual basis), they can go read The Washington Post. Why bother disrupting the flow of discussion on a site that doesn't share your ideals?

I remember when it was an actual news site, and not Linus' personal cheering section.

Shrug, to me it's still a news site; just because it covers news you'd prefer not to hear doesn't mean that it is without merit. I'm personally glad Unix and open source have a site where they can get coverage that is accessible to the "average Joe" net junkie. Yes, they might be a corporate mouthpiece for VA Software, but who honestly gives a fuck? The media is the media. If you trust the media in any form, you're doomed.

Thats funny

[emkman]

variety is the spice of Slashdot.

I never knew variety and repost were synonyms

Re:Parking Spaces

[JebusIsLord]

I don't know, some funny things are insulting, but in this case he's just insulting because he thinks its funny.

I bet this guy is a barrel of laughs at parties..

[clink]

Section 508 clearly defines...

Re:Use your own advice

[vsprintf]

Completely infactual, outright lies and trolls are modded up if they're pro-linux.

infactual - You just made that up, right?

Which Slashdot have you been reading? Every anti-MS-bashing comment gets modded up. I'm beginning to think Bill is paying the boys and girls in Redmond overtime to patronize Slashdot.

And even more tragically. . .

[kfg]

these print designers are going back to their magazines and recasting them as "webpages."

The average magazine these days is mostly design and hardly any print. What's more, the design *sucks.*

I want my "old fashioned" words and pictures back. Take your design and stuff it.

What's more, I fully agree with you. On an actual webpage I want words and pictures *I* control the display of. Once again, take your "design" and stuff it - twice over.

The function of a magazine or webpage is not to be a medium for distributing "design."

*Design* is a medium for distributing information. If the "design" does not *enhance* the information in some way it's worse than a failure, it's an impediment, no matter how sucessful it may be as "art." Hell, even ART is supposed to be a medium for "information."

So inform. Don't "design."

One of the things that makes the web so powerful as a tool for distributing information is that it *allows* the user to manipulate the "design" in a way that makes the information more accesable to him/her. That's the whole bloody point!

Forcing me to read your semaphore font with black text on a tetured navy blue background doesn't make me marvel at your innovative "design." It makes me scream and go to another page.

Accesability? Hell, a good chunk of the web isn't accessable to *anyone* because it's the "designer's" brain that's disabled.

And they're taking print with them.

Feh!

KFG

Re:And even more tragically. . .

[DarkFall]

"Hell, even ART is supposed to be a medium for "information." "

Actually, art is communication...and while some communication is informative, it doesn't have to be.

As far as going off on this tangent about artists and information, I ask you again to make a distinction between information and communication. Not everything you see online or in print is information. At the same time...art comes in many forms and through many mediums..some is visual, some is audible and some is even edible.

There are all sorts of artists in the world. Some are good, some not so..and some you may or may not get depending on how well you identify with what they are trying to communicate to you. Some use HTML as a medium to communicate, and some do it well, and some don't and many don't care...design and art can and does co-exist with information..you'll find that most often it's the individual that can't co-exist with some design and art...out of purely subjective (albeit valid) reasons.

In short...most often (not always) something sucks because you don't like..that doesn't make it bad.

Re:And even more tragically. . .

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

The average magazine these days is mostly design and hardly any print. What's more, the design *sucks.*

Really? I haven't noticed that at all. Of course, that could be because I never see any actual content in mags any more. It's almost like buying an porfolio of advertisements.

Seriously though. I think you're confusing the difference between bad design and properly done typography/typesetting type design.
I can guarantee you, that a thoughtfully designed web-site, will not only look better than plain old HTML, but will also be easier to use and read. And if they use CSS, then it will also work around accessibility problems, ranging from disabilities, to choice in font sizes.

Unfortunately, there are so few websites that do proper design via CSS etc, that I can't pull a link out of my head at the moment (except for maybe A List Apart).

There is no reason a designer should not be able to get a design to look the exactly the way they want it. As long as the user is able to override it easly.

Section 508, web accessibility

[Benetech]

I was very impressed with Joe's answers on these questions. I was one of the members of the federal advisory committee that drafted the initial take on Section 508's web accessibility regs. His statement about the web accessibility business is right on: this is a temporary blip as we go through a transition to where accessibility just becomes another part of good design.
One thing I will take issue with is Joe's statement that accessibility advocates want alternative text sites. I think that approach falls under the separate and unequal approach: tried that and it's been discredited. The goal for almost everyone is that the same site work for everybody and look good. It isn't hard.
The issue about people with cognitive impairments is that they have few advocates at the national lobbying table (other disability groups are good at self-advocacy), plus it isn't clear what to do to make sites more accessible other than make them more usable for everybody.

Text descriptions of graphics

[mttlg]

One consequence of this ignorance of visual design? The implicit claim that every illustration can be epitomized in words. You could only make this claim if you were so visually unsophisticated that you couldn't differentiate one kind of illustration from another. Of course, this is hogwash: The reason why we use illustrations is because words (or numbers) are sometimes too hard to understand by themselves.

This is the problem I have with some accessibility guidelines - if a picture is worth a thousand words, they want that thousand words in a caption. My web site has hundreds of pictures, so I will never be in full compliance with these kinds of guidelines. My approach has been to add some basic descriptive text to a page with thumbnails, making the same text available to everyone. The text itself is used to tell a story, and the details from the pictures that are mentioned are selected based on their relevance to the story. The consequence of bringing my site into compliance with these unrealistic guidelines through special description tags would be less content available to general viewers, since the time to write the descriptions would be taken from the time I would use to add new content.

While my site is just a personal site that shouldn't necessarily be required to be accessible (though this leads into another topic for debate), I would imagine that this would be an issue at some level for most sites - how do you balance providing special content for the disabled and providing basic content to everyone?

Many other types of accommodations are commonly utilized by all types of people - wheelchair ramps and TV/video captions are good examples of this, and this would be the rough equivalent of navigation aids and ALT tags, which are the two main accessibility features that Joe Clark mentioned in his second answer. When you get into special HTML tags like full text descriptions of images, most people probably won't even realize that they exist, as is the case with things like radio reading services for the blind.

At this point, I have no idea where I'm going with this (my apologies for any accessibility issues regarding the lack of a concluding point). I started with one of this guy's points and mostly ended up at another one, so I guess he seems like a reasonable person.

Oh come on

[kfg]

I mean, where else but Slashdot could you find hot grits down petrified Natalie Portman's pants?

You don't find that sort of variety just anywhere.

KFG

XHTML & CSS Specs

[Oculus Habent]

One of the biggest problems is that the specifications provided to make everything the same are filled with optional components. There are several different border styles, but only a few work because most are optional. While this provides freedom to the person following the spec, it doesn't provide a consistent experience.

Re:LOL

[bethenco]

Hearing your anecdote was very interesting to me.

I used to wonder why standards compliance on the web is so abysmal and why so many web sites are filled with cruft (needless Java, Flash, client-side scripting, images used for layout, etc.). The goal in making a usable website seemed obvious to me: make sure there aren't any nasty design bits tangled up in your content. If you want, include the design bits cleanly separated off to the side (e.g., in a stylesheet) so they can be easily disregarded, changed, or removed.

After reading your post, I realized that not everyone has the same purpose in mind for the web that I have. As a programmer / computer engineer, I tend view the web as a means of conveying essentially non-artistic content. You want to keep the content in the form of clean, well-defined data so it can be properly interpreted and further transformed by programs. But for some people, the web is a medium used not only to convey information as simple data, but to convey information through artistic sensibilities.

Perhaps in some cases, content cannot be separated from design because part or all of the content *is* the design.

To me, the ideal website is still close to a text-only, content-structured document, but I think I now understand why a seemingly intelligent person might make an entire website in a Flash applet.

I rather thought that your conclusion. . .

[kfg]

was a self evident axiom. The inmates have clearly taken over the asylum. Still, that's the beauty of the web. You're free to make your own webpage, even a shitty one.

However, and no inate disrespect to your friend, but her problem isn't her "artistic vision." It's her arrogance. It's the same sort of arrogance that thinks what's on TV should meet her standards and refuses to accept the argument that she could just change the channel. Well, the arrogant "artiste" is a cultural sterotype. Some stereotypes are more stereotypical than others though. This seems to be one of them.

It doesn't have to be that way though. I know. I am closely aquainted with nationally known fine artists ( Hell, one of them bore me), some of even of relative fame, and one of the things that's always struck me about some of the best artists is that they fully understand that *their* artistic vision doesn't mean crap. Sooner or later they are going to *show* their "vision" to someone else. That someone else, like it or not, is the final arbiter of what their vision "is."

"Artistes" who so vehemently defend their artistic vision in the manner of your arrogant friend aren't artists. They're masturbaters with oil pastels. They're making artistic love to the one they love best, themselves. They'll even state that explicitly if prodded, although they have no idea that's what they're doing. You see, if asked they'll proudly state they are engaged in "self expression."

Well fine. Go ahead with your artistic therapy or Turette's Syndrome. See if care though.

Your "self expression" only becomes *art* when *I* look at it though, and I'm only willing to engage in the artistic dialog ( written as in poetry or visual imagery as in a painting), and it *IS* a dialog, if you are speaking to me. You must, at some point, not only recognize my existence, you must respect it.

You want to tell me your vision? Fine, but in exchange you have to listen to mine. Art (as opposed to talking/painting to yourself) is an *exchange.*

Your artist friend hasn't figured this out yet. If she never does she is unlikely to ever be a great artist, or human being.

Of course that doesn't mean she won't be a "sucessful" artist. There are plenty of people with money who love to be abused artistically. Go figure.

In the meantime what most of us will do when we go to her page, instead of appreciating her art ( which she may find desirable), we'll just think, "Well, that's annoying," and go away.

What's more, no matter how good her art was we'll think of her *art* as annoying, even though it was just her presentation of it.

Mondrian dispensed with the frame. Your friend seems to want to do the same, but doesn't realize that what she's *actually* done is replace it with an annoying and distracting frame because she doesn't understand her medium. Also not a good thing for an artist.

If she payed attention to her audience she'd already know this.

A webpage is *explictly* intended to be viewed by others. Why else did they bother to put the page on the web? Ignoring your audience, or outright disdaining them, is just plain doofey.

And did I mention it's arrogant?

With regards to accessability I have such an arrogant friend too. When I've suggested he could make his webpage ( an otherwise very fine one) a little more accessable to the blind, or even just Netscape users, he has replied, in essence, "Fuck 'em, they're only about 10% of the web population."

Don't be an arrogant web designer. Respect your audience. Otherwise, why the hell should they respect you or what you have to say?

10% of the web population has already told my friend, " Well fuck you too buddy," without ever reading one word of his *opinion* driven webpage.

Now that's what I call getting the word out, eh?

KFG

Re:I rather thought that your conclusion. . .

[MrResistor]

Ouch! The truth hurts!

Really, very well put.

Re:LOL

[nakaduct]

[users lack] sufficient control over the rendering of pages to achieve a visually pleasing display

False. Both IE and Mozilla provide a global style sheet, in which you may say: h1 { font-size: 18px !important } to obtain pleasantly-sized headers.

Did you miss...

[PatientZero]

...that Bill Shatner's responses were transcribed from a telephone conversation by a Slashdot editor?

Funny..

[Felipe Hoffa]

And what is the attitude of slashdot editors to criticism? Just try parsing this page through the W3 XML Validator.

Re:I'm partly deaf, and I don't get accessible mov

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Hmm, I didn't know Oppenheimer was deaf

How sad

[autopr0n]

I remember a year or so ago everyone was posting Chinese and japanese text all over everywhere (mostly in their .sigs. Actualy, I think I might have been the first... under a diffrent account, obviously)

Its really amazing how anal slashdot is about censoring things. They bitch about 'freedom of information' but then ban ASCII art and non-english char sets. It even makes it hard to show things like simple graphs or whatever.

Re:hmm

[dvdeug]

If your accessibility software requires alt tags for my meaningless shim images (not that I use any) then your accessibility software sucks.

If you don't have alt tags for your meaningless shim images (which are required by the latest HTML standards), your HTML sucks. How is accessibility software supposted to know whether you didn't bother to add ALT tags (and it should try to read the graphic name so the reader has some idea what's there) or if it's a meaningless image? It could guess, but wouldn't it much better if you just told it?

Re:hmm

[drinkypoo]

How is accessibility software supposted to know whether you didn't bother to add ALT tags (and it should try to read the graphic name so the reader has some idea what's there) or if it's a meaningless image?

Well, a computationally non-intensive method to decide if an image was important to the document at large would be to determine the amount of variance in the image, especially if there is none. If every pixel is the same color, or it's just a transparent image with no data on the color channels, or the transparency is maximum regardless of the raster layer, you can probably assume it's a shim. If the image is too small to convey a character, then you can assume it's not text. If most of the images have alt tags, but some of them don't, then obviously it's not 100% that the ones without them don't need them, but it does make it more likely. And finally, images with alt="" don't actually mean that there's nothing on the image, all it means for sure is that the HTML editor has inserted an alt tag for compliance.

An image without an alt tag on a page with other images with alt tags which is not linked to anything is probably not important.

Re:hmm

[dvdeug]

As I said, it can guess. But most of your suggestions require the program to download the image, which is a waste of time if you can't display it.

DirtyBastards.com

[sparkz]

No direct link - great, so they get slashdotted, and don't even know why!

flash .. love it .. hate it..

[n3m6]

the one thing i hate about flash. cannot be indexed with web spiders. and that means none of the flash sites can be found from google.com.

Re: What's the difference?

[The Cydonian]

(... in the immortal words of Woody Allen's character in Annie Hall: ) it's all mental masturbation.

Re:hmm

[drinkypoo]

I'd just only download the smallest images, or those loaded the largest number of times on a page. In addition I would load the smallest images first, might as well since you're not going to look at any of them.

Irony...or Stubbornness?

[RAMMS EIN]

``In one of the many ironies of Web development, it is indie developers like me who have a higher success rate in achieving valid, accessible sites even though larger commercial operations are the ones where valid HTML and accessibility are more urgently needed.''
I think this is largely due to the stubbornness of PHBs. They don't want the relatively new accessibility features, they want what has worked in the past: <font>, <br> and <img>. In part, they are right. If your entire website is in HTML 2.0 with FONT tags all over, changing that to XHTML with CSS is a huge venture. It is well-known that such operations are costly and error-prone. CSS is a compatibility nightmare due to lacking browser support (especially from the folks at Redmond). And the vast majority of viewers are thought to be better served by a flashy but standards-violating site than a standards-compliant site that doesn't look perfect due to their browser not fully supporting those standards.

Another issue is laziness, uncompetence, or convenience. Many webmasters prefer using specialized authoring tools for creating their websites in a WYSIWYG manner. I don't know any such tool that complies to the latest standards as well as me and my text editor do. WYSIWYG is the wrong paradigm for websites. They are browsed in vastly different environments, by vastly different people, with vastly different needs, and corresponding software. The correct paradigm would be WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean), in line with the ideal of the semantic web. I've seen people use tools that provide buttons for making text bold or underlined, but not for emphasis or strong emphasis. It makes me barf. It can be argued that web authoring tools are less error-prone than typing in a text editor. This would be true, if the code output by said tools would be valid according to current standards. It is said that authoring tools are efficient. This is probably true for some. I am quicker with a good text editor than with any authoring tool I've tried. Menu options? No thanks, I'd rather type tags and run scripts. In some cases, easy to use authoring tools can be a necessity. Suppose that various departments had different sections on the website where they periodically posted updates. The people working in those departments may not have enough expertise to author XHTML. They shouldn't have to. Hiring a qualified webmaster for each department may not be an option. Here, authoring tools help out. If the code they spit out stinks, that's the price you pay for not hiring a qualified webmaster. It's a trade-off.

One thing that bothers me when writing webpages is the unability to test things. I can check if my webpage is compliant with XHTML 1.1. I can check that my CSS is valid. I can verify that it works well with lynx. I can even have friends check if it works well with MicroSoft Internet Explorer. However, that still doesn't tell me how accessible my page is to people with disabilities. I can't test how it works in OmniCorp's BrailleBrowser, because I don't own a copy, and I can't read braille anyway. I can put in aural CSS if I want, but I have no way to do anything meaningful with it, as I don't have any software that interprets it. I don't know anybody who does use a braille browser, or a screen reader that interprets aural CSS. I don't know where to get software to test these things, and if it requires me to pay up, never mind, it's just a hobby. The best I can do is making sure my pages comply to standards and hope for the best.

Re:Use your own advice

[Natalie's Hot Grits]

"but you'll have to point out said posts if you really want to make your point, instead of generalizing about it"

If you don't agree with his premise about slashdot moderation, you probably don't know what you are talking about. If you don't read slashdot enough to be able to recall the posts he speaks of, then you are not informed/qualified enough on this topic to have this discussion listing all these (arguably obviouls) truisms.

If, on the other hand, you don't agree his argument is valid, say so. Don't go off putting words into his mouth about generalizing. When someone posts something that is factual, and you don't agree with it, that is not the definition of "invalid" or "generalization".

While uninformed and unsound arguments such as yours might seem right to people that don't know any better, they still degrade the quality of the world.

Re:Use your own advice

[runderwo]

If you don't read slashdot enough to be able to recall the posts he speaks of, then you are not informed/qualified enough on this topic to have this discussion listing all these (arguably obviouls) truisms.

Um, or maybe the posts don't exist? This is why citations are important whenever you're going to make an argument and expect to be taken seriously.

Sure, it's MY fault that I can't prove his argument...

When someone posts something that is factual, and you don't agree with it, that is not the definition of "invalid" or "generalization".

When someone makes sweeping claims of any sort, that is the book definition of generalization. Generalization is almost completely useless as an argumentation technique because it requires the vast majority of evidence to be clearly in favor of the argument, in order for holes not to be found. But if the vast majority of evidence is already in favor of the argument, there is rarely anything to argue about!

In effect, the original post was a baseless generalization, and none of the replies did anything to defend it whatsoever. If someone wishes to make an argument, they must provide evidence beyond appealing for the reader to accept it at face value. Otherwise, it is NOISE.

Re: book names underlined or italicized

[tomhudson]

Do you underline or italicize your name? :-)

Besides, underlines don't show up on slashdot - and people would try to click on them and complain aobut broken links :-(

I use italics for parenthetical meterial (like this) as a side-note, or for extra contextual material. Most people get it. Besides, if you were to do this in plain text (which all html should downgrade gracefully to), quotes are the common way to denote a book name. :-)

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

I guess I'm not a person

[some guy I know]

People want webpages to seem alive. People want an interactive web. This is something that's a foreign concept to most linux users: You are all used to seeing pages like CGIwrap's webpage

That page loads almost instantly, has no scripting, flash, or other security-reducing crap, doesn't try to override my browser preferences, and is very readable.

Take a look, for example, at the 2 Advanced Studios webpage. Tell me you've seen a cooler webpage, and I'll tell you you're lying.

That page takes over 10 seconds to load over my 56K modem line, and uses pictures for text, which are unreadable without a microscope on my 1600x1200 19" display.
I don't think that that's very cool at all.
And I'm not lying.

give people what they want. It's all about target marketing. Linux geeks are content to see pages like the cgi-wrap page. HOWEVER, normal people are impressed by things that move, things that make noise, things that interact.

So, you are writing that web pages should be designed like Fisher-Price toys, that your target market is people with the intelligence or attention span of babies?

Making a good looking, interactive page, with javascript menus, flash animations, etc, means "I have taken an interest in my work, and I care what it looks like".

Making a page with javascript menus, flash animations, etc., means "I don't care about the viewer's bandwith requirements. I don't care about viewers who have all of that crap turned off due to security concerns, company policy, etc. I don't care whether my page is accessible to people with disabilities. I care more about what the page looks like than about the information. The content on my page is so uninteresting, so dull, so incredibly boring, that I have to dress it up to try to distract the user from realizing that I don't really have much to say."

they know how to make a page look better than you do

But I don't want my web page to look better than I do. :)

People like him are the reason it's ok to have a website that looks like [feces], and I say I've had enough.

People like you are the reason that web designers think that it's OK to have a website with all flash (pun intended) and glitter ("Oooo! Shiny!"), but devoid of content.

Re:hmm

[drinkypoo]

Actually, I personally don't use shims, nor do I use graphics links in most cases. Shims are for people who can't understand that HTML is no TML. If I want per-pixel control I'm using PDF. Even THAT is device-independent but it's a whole hell of a lot closer to 1:1 from my screen to yours than HTML could ever be.

I do think however that it's ridiculous to whine about how people aren't making standards-compliant pages when the problems can be solved in software. It's a lot easier than getting people to do the "right thing".

Re: book names underlined or italicized

[ttfkam]

Do you underline or italicize your name?

No, because according to the rules of English, you shouldn't. According to those same rules of English, book titles are italicized or, in the case of handwriting, underlined.

I use italics for parenthetical meterial ( like this) as a side-note, or for extra contextual material.

You are among a small minority. Parentheses are commonly used for asides that do not fit within the context of the associated sentence.

Besides, if you were to do this in plain text (which all html should downgrade gracefully to), quotes are the common way to denote a book name.

_Book Name_ is more common in practice. This is one of the many areas where plain text is deficient over a document with structured formatting.

If you really want to split hairs, you shouldn't have used parentheses in your last sentence as the parenthetical material is closely associated with the content of the enclosing sentence. As a comma is too soft a break in the flow of the sentence, it would have worked better with an mdash.

"Besides, if you were to do this in plain text -- to which all html should downgrade gracefully -- quotes are the common way to denote a book name."

I realize that two hyphens are not technically an mdash, but at least it holds some semblance of correctness. Think of English as a complex programming language and the reader as a compiler or runtime environment. The more strict the input, the faster it gets processed.

Your use of italics in parentheses and quotes around book titles is akin to errant C macros that redefine core functionality. It obfuscates. You are, of course, entitled to your own writing style, but don't presume that it's correct or encourage others to adopt the practice.

Just because people are largely ignorant of the rules of English does not mean that those rules do not exist. It's a crying shame that grammar isn't taught in most U.S. public schools anymore.

FYI: I studied literature in college; however, I thought that an analogy to programming would go over better in this forum.

Re: book names underlined or italicized

[tomhudson]

First off, I don't italicize my name because, unlike books, I am a living thing. Secondly, if you check books, when they quote a person, and include the person's name, it's often to the bottom right, in italics, along w. dob and other info.

Parenthetical material is just that, anything you decide as an author to stick in parenthesis. It usually is additional information that expands on the sentence's main thought (see your usage in your post as an example).

Look, we ALL studied literature in college. Big fucking shit. The use of __ to represent an em-dash is ludicrous for most readers. Readers aren't compilers.

As to the use of italics in parenthesis, this helps visually set off the parenthetical material. This helps the reader see that the parenthetical material isn't an essential part of the main sentence.

As to using C macros that redefine core functionality being obfuscation, that's totally rediculous. The core functionality of C is the set of keywords and operators, which cannot be redefined. In C++, they (operators) can be overloaded, but the keywords cannot.

Perhaps you meant C libraries? The libraries are not, and have never been, part of the C language core. There are standard libraries that ship with most C compilers, but they are always implementation-dependent.

Would you call this obfuscation?

#define strs char**

#define str char*

It makes clear that, in C, a string is really a pointer to the first of a series of bytes in ram, and that an array of strings is really a pointer to a bunch of pointers. It also lets the user type less.

a note on macros

[ttfkam]

The preprocessor is not C.

#define char int

is perfectly permissible. The following compiles and runs fine. Go ahead, try it. I'm not saying it's good coding style, but would you argue that all coders demonstrate good coding style?

#include <stdio.h>
#define char int

int main () {
char hello = 387;
printf("%d\n", hello);
}