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W3C Finalizes Disability Guidelines
AltImage writes "Bringing a five-year project to a significant milestone, the World Wide Web Consortium finalized guidelines for building browsers and media players that work better for people with disabilities. Read the full story here."
..as long as Microsoft daoesn't give a fuck these exercises are unfortunately completely useless...
"One of the things that has been both intriguing and promising from early on is that accessibility solutions didn't just help solve the problems they were created to solve," said Judy Brewer, director of the WAI. "We encourage the use of Web graphics. But someone accessing the Web through a PDA can't see a graphic, table or chart that well. For accessibility, you'd want someone to be able to visually scan it if they could, query it, run through it in a linear mode. Those flexibility user choices are precisely the things that people accessing the Web through alternate devices need as well."
She brings up a very good point. Like the products that were initially developed for space flight but found their way into general consumer use (Velcro, etc.), general web accessibility has a number of other benefits besides making the web accessible to people with disabilities.
This brings up a question which I'd like to see discussed either here, or in a new topic. I do not have a disability that prevents me from accessing the web via traditional means. However, I'm curious to ask people who use assistive devices: what is your experience going online like? How much content can you access? How do you feel about it? I know these questions have been generally answered by the document, but I'm curious about personal stories.
I strongly believe that the path to better accessability lies in the creation of better screen reader technology. There is absolutely no way that the billions of pages online are going to be retouched to make them accessable. The battle has, to a large degree, already been lost. Don't get me wrong...I'm all in favor of producing compliant pages, but I wonder what percentage of the Internet is compliant today? We're never going to clean up the mess. There are too many mediocre and amateure web developers out there who don't even know what the W3C is. Forget converting the developers and instead focus on efforts to create the uber-screenreader. Something capabale of navigating through the web applications we're using today. I do lots of work for hotels and with their reservation systems in particular. Do you have any idea how hard it is to book a hotel room with a screen reader? or a plane ticket, or anything. It's a joke.
This is the perfect area for open source software. I also think that this would be the perfect place for the goverment to get involved. Not in legislation but in funding. The government seems very interested in passing laws to ensure equal access but isn't it about time they write a check to make equal access on the Internet a reality. One perfect piece of software will solve this entire problem for everybody.
If Velcro had been part of the space program, how come it was developed in the 1940s by a Swiss inventor walking his dog?
Hopefully this initiative will drive the production of better browsers (user agents) and web development that will facilitate services to users.
User agents are improving on the implementation of the HTTP_ACCEPT header for determining MIME types the user agent will accept. This great potential was missed with Netscape Navigator 2 because, in the rush to get it to market, they just defaulted to using *.* (this browser accepts everything), when it didn't. If this was implemented correctly it would allow the developer to deliver media according to the user agents capacity.
Also see User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 and the UAAG discussion list.
Also of interest in the same area are;