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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."
Microsoft is part of the W3C, and help make many of these standards. If you look at the acknowledgments [w3.org] you'll see Microsoft is actually a member of the working group responsible for these guidelines.
Haahahaa (sorry, I couldn't help myself). This explains why hugely respected accessibility expert Mark Pilgrim slated the MS site redesign in October then (as did Zeldman)? See the news post over at the Web Standards Project (scroll to the bottom of the page).
In summary: Invalid. Inaccessible. Undecipherable in a text-only browser.
Don't get me wrong, Microsoft have some fantastic employees such as Tantek Çelik (who's site kicks major ass BTW) who care passionately about standards, but MS doesn't seem to want to listen most of the time...
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.
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.