W3C Web Accessibility Standards 2.0

WildFire42 writes "The W3C has released their W3C WCAG 2.0 Standards (that's World Wide Web Consortium Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) for a request for comments before it becomes a standard. I've discovered quite a variety of geeks here that may access web content in a variety of methods, from screen readers, to Braille displays, to open captioning on streamed videos, etc. Web accessibility is still in its infancy (relatively), but is becoming a concern for more people every day. Once the WCAG 2.0 becomes a recognized standard (probably sometime in 2004), it will most likely be a concern for web developers, but the W3C still wants input from the public, to get a feel of the kinds of disabilities that have not received enough focus in the 1.0 standards. More information on the Interest Group is at the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative page. Your input and insight is needed!"

Comments

the internet community

[Anonymous Coward]

should first make sure all browsers comply to the standards before rolling out new ones.

Re:the internet community

[cmang]

I would think the web browser developer community would do good to comply with standards more, sure.. but it's cool to see that standards are being set for a new useful generation of web interactivity (ie: the disabled-access terminals). I'd hope to see more of that sort of technology popping up in society as standards are set for making the web more accessible to people.

Re:the internet community

[Anime_Fan]

Actually, this is a standard on how to create pages so people will be able to access the page even if they for some reason can't use bleeding-edge graphical browsers (blindness) or can't hear the audio of Flash animations / audio clips.

It's a standard that tells you _how_ to use the already existing standards (such as the alt property on tags or providing transcripts to audio feeds).

Then again, I'm sure you already knew this, and thus posted this as an AC. Still, people may not be as smart as you, so I'll post it anyways =D

Pew!

[thorgil]

Pew! took a while to read it.
No wonder people don't RTFA.

Re:Pew!

[RobotWisdom]

Like all W3C proclamations, this has three deadly accessibility problems:

1. 20+ screens of meta-information before the real content starts
2. written in an over-abstract, PhD-thesis prose-style
3. readability is decreased by highlighting many phrases as inline anchortext (better to isolate the links at the end of the sentence or paragraph, imho)

Re:Pew!

[Dausha]

2. written in an over-abstract, PhD-thesis prose-style

Perhaps, then, somebody should write the "In Plain English" or "Clearly Explained" version?

Re:Pew!

[zsau]

readability is decreased by highlighting many phrases as inline anchortext (better to isolate the links at the end of the sentence or paragraph, imho)

That is without a doubt a matter of opinion. I know you've said that, but I still feel like presenting my reason for believing the opposite.

Basically, separating the link from what it refers to is incredibly bad. It makes it harder to work out what it's referring to. It might become somewhat useless.

I realise and understand that Metafilter-style let's-mark-every-other-word-as-a-link can be annoying, destracting, useless and stupid. Especially when you're picking random words and linking to related sites when it could be better done by listing your resounces. However, this should not make you want to remove every single inline link.

If you're referring to an organisation or source of information, it's very useful only helpful to put it there.

So umm... I'm very bad at having debates when I have an actual point to prove and am not just arguing out of my arse on topics of the universe. But I think I might've got my message across...

If you find any inline links to be too intrusive, just set your user agent to underline them in the same color as the text around them. or make them italic. or purple. or something. Your useragent does let you do that, doesn't it?

Re:Pew!

[RobotWisdom]

Basically, separating the link from what it refers to is incredibly bad. It makes it harder to work out what it's referring to.

My theory is that there's three important dimensions in labelling a link: first the topic, then the resource-type (etext, image, etc), and last the rating (good or bad).

Topic usually doesn't change within a sentence, so I like to add a 'text button' at the end that augments the topic-info with the resource-type. [examples]

I usually skip the rating unless it's especialy good or bad.

If you're referring to an organisation or source of information, it's very useful only helpful to put it there.

The problem is, you can't specify the resource type-- if it's a book-title, are you linking a full etext, or a review, or the Amazon page? For an organisation, you can guess it will be their official website, but this is not reliable. (I make an exception when the sentence mentions the resource type, like "There's a great weblog I stumbled upon...")

If you find any inline links to be too intrusive, just set your user agent

They reduce readability for everyone, even if the color is tweaked, so the author should look for a better way....imho.

Re:Pew!

[zsau]

Hmm... actually, you make a good point. Usually when someone does something like that, they do things like this[1], which is incredibly annoying and only removes any sort of continuity. I've seen that manner of linkage done too many times on webpages (once is too many, but I've seen it a lot more than once).

[1]: http://www.example.com/ (So you can understand why I hated it so much.)

But I might consider using it. But I'm not sure that I'd have much use: My webpage (which I'll accessiblise and fix up (not everything there is linked too) soonish), I think, normally either makes it clear what I'm linking too or links to things within my site. (And it probably isn't especially important; it's merely an information repository that most people will never look at; some will look at it once, and a handful will come back later.)

Re:Pew!

[zsau]

I was thinking about it, and one comment I would have is the [comments] don't actually say what they're linking too, only what kind of content there is. Links should, and I know I don't always obey this but I will eventually, actually say what they are. Then you begin to get long things like [(dummy) etext on rabid donkeys] and by that stage, you've lost the advantage of it, and might just as well have said that you should read the (dummy) re-hashed etext on rabid donkeys, and any advantage you might still have had you've totally lost, because that's what you would've (should've) said in the first place.

Re:Pew!

[Isofarro]

if it's a book-title, are you linking a full etext, or a review, or the Amazon page?

Gee, linking the relevant text to it perhaps.

Re:Pew!

[Isofarro]

Topic usually doesn't change within a sentence, so I like to add a 'text button' at the end that augments the topic-info with the resource-type. [examples] [robotwisdom.com]

This breaches WCAG2.0 Guideline 3.3.1.d which requires that linked text make sense out of context. No doubt, you will say that people don't use links out of context, and this has already been proven false. So your theory is widely considered to be an accessibility obstacle.

Naturally, you will recognise that WCAG2.0 is not yet a technical recommendation, so now look at Checkpoint 13.1 of WCAG 1.0 (which became a technical recommendation in 1999), which requires "Link text should be meaningful enough to make sense when read out of context -- either on its own or as part of a sequence of links.".#

This means that when the links from your page is presented as a list by themselves, having multiple links identified with [examples] all pointing to different resources is an obstacle to accessibility which makes it very difficult (priority 2) for disabled people to use your pages.

So your theory is inaccessible, and should be avoided.

Re:Pew!

[Anonymous Coward]

I can read 'em just fine. Moreover it's THE WHOLE POINT of hypertext. Links are supposed to name what they link to, not to give you a review of the document at the end of the link. If you don't LIKE hypertext, read a pdf, or a plain text file. Otherwise, be happy someone did it PROPERLY for once, instead of labelling every link "this".

Re:Pew!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, or he could just use some basic understanding of hypertext. Links were supposed to be descriptive way before accessibility guidelines came on the scene :/

Re:Pew!

[Ed Avis]

If you really do prefer to see links at the end of the paragraph or end of the document, it's possible to get the web browser to display them in that way (for example IE does this when printing a web page). The opposite transformation - picking up footnotes and inlining the links - is not nearly as easy. So write HTML that has the correct semantics for the element, with the content of the element being a short name description of the linked document, and don't mangle the HTML code just for a small presentational difference.

Hrmm

[acehole]

How about a recommendation to get rid of popups/unders?

sounds good to me...

Re:Hrmm

[Anonymous Coward]

deprecate ecmascript and DOM

Re:Hrmm

[Tirel]

how about you using a browser that doesn't allow popups (opera, all mozilla derivates, konqueror, all text browsers and dillo are just a few that come to mind), or if you really need to stick to the current browser, why not just use a proxy that blocks them (squid, junkbusters, proximitron, tinyproxy,... the list goes on) ?

Re:Hrmm

[PhxBlue]

How about a recommendation to get rid of popups/unders?

I haven't had a problem with them since I stopped using IE. :) Maybe we should put forward a recommendation that everyone who uses it switch to Mozilla, Opera, etc.?

Re:Hrmm

[xenotrout]

Removal of pop-ups is a recommendation of the current w3c accessability standards. Switching window focus without letting the user know that it is going to happen can confuse accessibility programs and users. I believe pop-unders are just a hack that switches focus back, so they are also not recommended.
Very few web sites that I've seen care about accessibility standards. Very few web devs, it seems, even care about W3C standards, because they develop for browsers (i.e. IE) rather than for the web (i.e. W3C standards). Check a number of pages with Watchfire Bobby and you'll see. Even slashdot has quite a few "violations" of the WCAG 1.0 standard.

Re:Hrmm

[jav1231]

Exactly. W3C has proposed more standards that will promptly be ignored by Microsoft...and subsequently, most webmasters and coders! Don't get me wrong, I wish more people would adhere to standards from W3C, but unfortunately, they target IE users and that's about it. JAV

Re:Hrmm

[technomancerX]

I do a lot of web development, and I hate IE with a passion. Ideally, I use Safari, and when I'm not on OS X I use Mozilla (or other Gecko based browsers).

The problem is that 95%+ of traffic that web sites see is IE. Realistically, when 95% of your traffic is one browser, you make sure things work in that browser first and worry about the other guys later, when time and budget permit. It sucks, but that's the way things are, and since AOL was bought off I don't see things getting any better.

Re:Hrmm

[loconet]

Yup. As an example, just recently my sister was using my computer to access her course schedule for school and for some reason a simple javascript button on her school's site wouldnt work. I tried it on Mozilla, Opera, NS 7 and none worked. I called the school to see what was happening and got greeted by "You need to get a proper browser - Internet Explorer". I had to hang up and stop myself from screaming at the woman.

Re:Hrmm

[Insurgent2]

You need to give them something to thing about: If 95% of the hits are IE, that leaves 5% that are not using IE and are prevented from using the site.
Now tell them to look at the percentage of hits that result in a paying customer (likely a fraction of a percent unless you're a defacto standard site like Amazon et al). So if they get 50000 hits, and their "customer" rate is 0.8% then that's 400 customers but since they omit 5% of hits, they only get 380 customers instead. Scale to larger numbers for more eye-opening results.
Basically, they are forcing themselves to lose 5% of their customers. And if they are selling something that's actually useful, those 5% are more likely to appreciate their product and aren't just mindless AOL "surfers" who only make $5/hour and are just wasting your customers bandwidth.

Re:Hrmm

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

The sad thing is that its not the fact that the script broke, its that there isn't a "fall-back". Desiging a site to work even when JavaScript isn't available isn't that difficult.

I guess when encountering such sites, we should all email/phone and complain. I s'pose the site owners get suckered into believing what the site "designers" have said about hardly anyone using anything other than IE.

Re:Hrmm

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

Code for standards and *then* make the site work in IE 5+

Thats what I do anyway. If a client wants specific browsers to work then I'll do it but it'll cost - to which they tend to agree with me!

Selling points are that:
1). The site will be accesible, thus more people will be able to access the site,
2). The client is less likely to be singled out as not caring for people with "special needs" (and yes, I do understand that I'm using FUD to sell!)
3). The site will continue to be accessible with *any* future browser. It might look screwy mind, but it will be accessible!

Myself, I really hate having to bastardise my lovely clean code to make it work in the various flavours of IE, but thats a commercial reality. I haven't thought up a way to sell sites that don't work in IE yet!!

Re:Hrmm

[dytin]

Holy crap, that site (http://www.ocad.ca/) is horrible! I'm so sick of people using java as a menuing system! And the pathetic thing is, is that the menus along the left side of the site (for example, click on 'student information') are in java, but could have been created entirely using standard CSS! And the truly pathetic thing is that the web developers probably got paid a premium for that piece of crap.

Here's a useful tool

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

If you want to test if your webpage is accessible to visually deficient people, you can ask Bobby to scan it and analyse it. Best accessibility report tool in town, I use it on all my pages.

Re:Here's a useful tool

[JimDabell]

Of course, automated tools cannot accurately test for compliance with WCAG, Section 508, or similar accessibility requirements, merely check a few things and give pointers to the bits it cannot check.

I've found that the Accessibility Valet does a very good job, much better than Bobby used to (I haven't tried Bobby in a while though).

Re:Here's a useful tool

[BrerBear]

Not to mention that many government agencies don't actually test against the spec, but rather they try to run the web application with buggy screen readers like JAWS which don't even support the specs very well. It is immensely frustrating to code to the spec, only to find that a customer uses a buggy tool to verify "compliance" and thinks your application doesn't meet guidelines.

We've tried to solve this by generating different web applications based on a user's accessibility preferences. Disabled users get pages generated for them which are optimized for screen readers and other users get smaller downloads. It's a lot of work, but the only approach we've found which doesn't cater to the lowest common denominator.

Re:Here's a useful tool

[Aquitaine]

Contrary to the parent, Bobby is the least useful accessibility report tool in town.

I work in an office that does accessibility reviews, and we have never used Bobby. It was bought out by a for-profit (after belonging to a NFP group for quite some time) and has more or less stagnated.

Bobby will give you an enormous list of things to fix, but most of what it says can be ignored and it ignores most of what needs to be said.

At the moment, our office doesn't recommend any automated accessibility checker. LIFT is better than Bobby, but there is no substitute for actually knowing the guidelines (which is not hard -- get the checklist instead of the W3C novella format).

Or hire us to come teach you. :)

Re:Here's a useful tool

[malex]

I also suggest LIFT as powerful tools for finding and fixing accessibility issues.

Re:Here's a useful tool

[kikta]

Bobby is the least useful accessibility report tool in town.

I agree - Bobby really is quite useless. It gets confused easily and spews out incorrect messages left and right. It's probably the worst validation tool I've ever used.

get the checklist instead of the W3C novella format

The checklist really is the best way to go.

Article

[Luigi30]

Now if only there was a standard to make Slashdot articles shorter...

Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[mrd_yaddayadda]

Some countries (UK, Australia two that I know) have some legislation in place whereby some sites *have* to be designed to meet accessibility guidelines for vision impaired folks.

This really annoyes me. The web is a visual medium. It should not be compulsory to cater for those that can't benefit from a visual medium, in a visual medium.

We don't have legislation to ensure that every book that is released has a braille version and a speaking book version do we? No. Why take on the web this way?

Yes I've been hit by this myself, and it's hugely frustrating being on the end of it as a site developer having the spectre of the law raised above you...

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[quinine]

Well, if you're talking about sites that provide govenment services then yes, accessability standards should be maintained. Just like if you go to a courthouse, there needs to be a ramp there for wheelchairs. If your talking about rubmyhotbutt.com, though, then I agree with you; this should not be compulsory.

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

This really annoyes me. The web is a visual medium. It should not be compulsory to cater for those that can't benefit from a visual medium, in a visual medium.

I've worked with blind people : there's a lot of simple services and entertainments that aren't accessible to them simply because selfish brats like you say "to hell with them, this or that isn't designed for them so why should we go out of our way to allow them to access it.".

Guess what: blind people go to art museums to touch sculptures, they go shooting at the range, they play golf, ... and they have a ton of fun doing it, just because someone a little more open-minded than you invented some gadget or method to allow them to have fun.

I wish you'd go blind for a day, just to make you feel what it's like to be denied entertainment because of selfish people who don't give a flying fuck about anything but themselves.

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[iangoldby]

I think you are missing the point that the web so easily could be an ideal medium for non-visual information.

For example, if you compare the technology required to read a paper book out loud to that required to read an electronic text file out aloud, I'm sure you will see that the latter is a far easier task. There's no reason to make it difficult, but designers do, just because they think it is more important to have a heading in their own choice of font (presented as a bitmap) than for a minority to be able to read it.

You might also like to bear in mind that local government in the UK has a duty to make information available in a form that people can understand. That's why most leaflets tell you where to get hold of a large-print version, or in audio tape form. (Presumably your neighbour tells you this from the original leaflet if you can't read it yourself!)

So I ask again: The web is ideally suited to avoid the effort required to make paper documents universally accessible. Why make it difficult?

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[finitimi]

Accessibility benefits everyone, not just the disabled. I recall back when wheelchair accesibility was first made a requirement for public places. I remember thinking to myself, "we have to spend all this money just for a few cripples?" Since then, I've raised a few children who I pushed around in strollers, and I was mighty glad for simple accessibility features such as sloping curb cuts in sidewalks.

The w3c guidelines are mostly common-sense hints about what not to do. Many barriers to access are unintentional; the w3c is doing web developers a service by pointing them out.

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[melonman]

From your comments, you seem to be suffering from the same misconception as whoever posted the article. Web accesibility is not in its infancy, it was strangled whilst learning to walk during Browser Wars, by a couple of greedy companies and a load of graphic designers, most of whom appear(ed) to know nothing about traditional publishing, let alone machine markup. What is happening now is Web Accessibility Reloaded.

If we want an Internet page description language, various options exist, including the newish SVG standard. But trying to force html into the role of Postscript just doesn't work. Leaving the blind and disabled to one side for a moment, how many websites even print properly with IE?

Legislation seems like a less than ideal way to get web designers to start behaving like professionals, but maybe it had to come to this. Multimedai implies that there is more than one medium, and websites should take this into account.

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[mrd_yaddayadda]

...just because someone a little more open-minded than you invented some gadget or method to allow them to have fun.

Ok then. Are you saying it should be compulsory for web pages to be written with accessibility in mind?

Do you also think it should be compulsory for all books to have braille and speaking book versions?

If so, who is going to pay for all that? You?

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[NulDevice]

In the US, it's Section508 of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

EVERYBODY and their brother gets up-in-arms about having the government legislate their web design. Nobody bothers to read this stuff.

So here're my bullet points:

1) s508 compliance it's only required if you're a federal government agency or contractor, and even then there are some exceptions.

2) C'mon people, it's really *not* that hard to comply. Got ALT tags? You're halfway there. Lose the 7 layers of nested tables and nobody'll complain.

3) it's 2003 now - the era of overdesigned websites ended with the .com crash. The vast market of consumers don't care if a site is animated to holy heck and streams ambient music anymore - It's not going to sell your product or content any better anymore than a well-designed but accessible/usable site.

4) A site doesn't have to be ugly and nonvisual to be accessible. Proper use of CSS can give you a fantastic site that degrades nicely into a screen-reader, brailler, etc.

5) Not every disabled person involved is a blind, deaf quadrapelegic. Some are just nearsighted folks who want to set the font size something above the Arial-submicroscopic-pt that eagle-eyed designers often use. Why not let them?

6) There are several hundred million users worldwide who consider themselves disabled in some way. If you're selling things, would you shut your door to 200,000,000 potential customers because it's inconvenient for you to serve them?

7) A plus to an accessible website is that it will almost always degrade well to other browsers - especially things like wireless devices and phones. Make your site accessible, and you've gone a long way towards making it mobile as well.

8) Jeffrey Zeldman's new book "Designing with Web Standards" is an excellent resource. He demonstrates how to use current standards like XHTML, CSS to create websites that are complaint with standards, work well on the vast majority of browsers, are attractive, usable, and accessible. Definitely worth checking out, as is his website, www.zeldman.com.

Accessibility shouldn't be considered an incovnenience - it's just good practice.

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[HBI]

Pretending that accessibility standards don't limit what you can't do with a web site is silly.

All US government sites are compelled to be Section 508 compliant and they are uniformly...well, ugly. Uglier than a good commercial site. Is it a causal relationship? No, probably not. But the Sec. 508 compliance isn't helping matters in that regard.

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[JimDabell]

All US government sites are compelled to be Section 508 compliant and they are uniformly...well, ugly. Uglier than a good commercial site.

Well they don't have to compete with other sites, and their credibility is judged differently to commercial sites, so why waste the resources?

Is it a causal relationship? No, probably not.

Then what is your point?

But the Sec. 508 compliance isn't helping matters in that regard.

Why would you expect an accessibility requirement to improve the graphical appeal of a website?

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[mrd_yaddayadda]

Why would you expect an accessibility requirement to improve the graphical appeal of a website?

And therein lies my whole problem with this. Accessibility compliant pages are damn ugly. Almost uniformly.

And so what we end up doing is take a visual medium and break it for those with different needs.

We add a ramp to stairs or make special parking places closer to entrances for disabled people and that doesn't break the stairs or the parking lot. Providing speaking book or braille versions of books doesn't break the textual books. Yet we want to break webpages. Why?

If we want to make sites accessible, then make dual sites. A limited site that has the information in a reader-readable way and the full featured site. A compulsory castration of the visual medium itself is just awful in my opinion.

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[Jage]

Good post. Makes me wish I had still some mod points left. The table hell should finally go, it's preventing mobile use of internet becoming widespread. You really DO hate when someone wants to make 800 px wide table fixed page when your web browser has 160-240 pixels horizontally... happy horizontal scrolling (unusable).

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[mrd_yaddayadda]

Accessibility shouldn't be considered an incovnenience - it's just good practice.

Might want to follow them at your own site then yeah? See, this is amusing. Preach about following accessibility but even the "not hard to comply" ALT tags, you don't have on your site. :P

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[JimDabell]

And therein lies my whole problem with this. Accessibility compliant pages are damn ugly. Almost uniformly.

That's not true at all.

And so what we end up doing is take a visual medium and break it for those with different needs.

Accessible websites don't have to be ugly. What makes you think that they do?

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[Anonymous Coward]

The vast market of consumers don't care if a site is animated to holy heck and streams ambient music anymore

I don't know how you'd compute the average, but there's at least a substantial number of users who'd rather wed designers leave the music out thank you very much.

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[Tsu Dho Nimh]

"Not every disabled person involved is a blind, deaf quadrapelegic. Some are just nearsighted folks who want to set the font size something above the Arial-submicroscopic-pt that eagle-eyed designers often use. Why not let them?" Also, anyone can be temporarily or intermittently disabled - just ask anyone with carpal tunnel sydrome, a broken wrist, or broken contacts. I would like to see designers have to do usability testing with something attached to their chairs that delivered shocks if they couldn't find it fast enough, and then give them a variety of browsers and corrective lenses and other handicaps to simulate what their users go through. But I'm a sadist.

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[Isofarro]

Providing speaking book or braille versions of books doesn't break the textual books. Yet we want to break webpages. Why?

The web is a more flexible and accessible medium than print will ever be. The web doesn't suffer print's shortcomings of inflexible page sizes, inking processes, and a lot of rules that work well in the print world fail when used on the web. The print world is inflexible, the web is not.

What can be done on the web for very low cost is extortionately expensive for the print world. Since the web is a more accessible medium, it is easier to create an accessible information flow here than in its print cousins. So there is really no relevant comparison between print and the Web. The Web is designed to be completely accessible to its audience, print fails with the same resources.

If we want to make sites accessible, then make dual sites

Well, if you are prepared to pay twice for the same website, and still get sued because your accessible version is out of step with the inaccessible geek-gaw, then you only have yourself to blame. It is possible, as already pointed out, to deliver good looking functional websites that are also accessible.

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[HBI]

Accessible websites don't have to be ugly. What makes you think that they do?

Because most sites suck anyway. Mediocre developers producing the best they can. Making them conform to standards that tend to make sites look bad (by your own admission) just turns an already bad situation to shit.

Face it, anything beyond a teletype interface is going to be really crappy for the disabled. Maybe we should all go back to command lines for everything as a result.

Didn't think so. Spreading the misery isn't a solution for the travails of the disabled.

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[Isofarro]

This really annoyes me. The web is a visual medium.

Using my browser, you sound like an idiot. The web isn't a visual medium, a visual representation of a web page is only one representation, and not the only representation.

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[Isofarro]

Are you saying it should be compulsory for web pages to be written with accessibility in mind?

As opposed to mindless drivel posturing as logical arguments, of couse.

Do you also think it should be compulsory for all books to have braille and speaking book versions?

Ahhh, so you can't tell the difference between a web page and a book.

who is going to pay for all that?

Where on earth do you get off delivering a half-assed job, and then _expect_ to get paid to fix it. Why not do it right the first time. Designing accessible websites ain't difficult, and not expensive. Only if you cock-up badly does it cost a lot to fix. Perhaps its time for you to learn how to do your job properly now.

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[JimDabell]

Making them conform to standards that tend to make sites look bad (by your own admission) just turns an already bad situation to shit.

Are you confusing me with somebody else? I am arguing that conforming to standards does not make sites look bad.

The rest of your argument is the tired old "lowest common denominator" straw man argument that has been refuted over and over again. I don't see the point in rehashing it once more, so just read this refutation instead.

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[Isofarro]

In the US, it's Section508 of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

No it isn't. This is a common mistake.

Section 508 is actually Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. Americans with Disabilities Act also covers the accessibility requirement. There is also the Section 255 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 also lays out accessibility guidelines.

Section 508 applies to federal agencies and companies providing service to federal agencies

ADA applies to businesses and government organisations providing public accommodation - so basically offering a service to the general public.

Section 255 applies to telecommunications companies.

Three separate pieces of legislation all covering the topic of accessibility.

The rest of your post is excellent. Kudos.

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[ectoraige]

First off, accessibility is not just an issue for blind people. There are many disabilites which the WCAG guidelines try to cater for.

Second, the web is not a visual medium, it is a mechanism to interconnect information. Markup languages structure this information which makes it easier to present in non-standard, but sensible, manners. That is why we should take on the web this way.

Finally, most of the recommendations are common sense pointers, the fact that you found them highly frustrating indicates that you did not design the site well in the first place.
Just having correct markup, and doing sensible things like filling in the alt tags in images pretty much ensure level 1 compliance.

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[Anonymous Coward]

"2) C'mon people, it's really *not* that hard to comply. Got ALT tags? You're halfway there. Lose the 7 layers of nested tables and nobody'll complain."

I always use ALT tags, but you know - I'll keep my nested tables, thanks. I see absolutely no reason to get rid of them when they've been working just fine for years. Should I be punished, because the designers of software for the blind did a crappy job?

Imagine if there were 'security standards' that told you to leave your computer unplugged from the Internet, because it wasn't very secure. Why? "Oh, Windows just can't handle the Internet, Microsoft didn't get around to coding that yet."

"4) A site doesn't have to be ugly and nonvisual to be accessible. Proper use of CSS can give you a fantastic site that degrades nicely into a screen-reader, brailler, etc."

Why should I have to replace my font tags and tables, that have worked absolutely well for *years*, with some new fangled technology that does the same thing?

Would that we could have this sort of push for electric and fuel-cell powered cars!

"5) Not every disabled person involved is a blind, deaf quadrapelegic. Some are just nearsighted folks who want to set the font size something above the Arial-submicroscopic-pt that eagle-eyed designers often use. Why not let them?"

What you talkin' 'bout, Willis? Dude, if you can't change the font of the site you're reading, try using a decent browser - maybe Internet Explorer. *snort*

"8) Jeffrey Zeldman's new book "Designing with Web Standards" is an excellent resource. He demonstrates how to use current standards like XHTML, CSS to create websites that are complaint with standards, work well on the vast majority of browsers, are attractive, usable, and accessible. Definitely worth checking out, as is his website, www.zeldman.com."

Guess what? Plain old 'current' standards like HTML work well with the vast majority of browsers, are attractive, useable, and pretty damned accessible.

Again, I ask - should I be the one to have to make up for the lackluster coding of another company?

*Why* can't blind reading software handle tables, hmm? I see no logical reason other than, "Well, we thought it was too hard to program, so you should all change your websites!!!"

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

I would like to see designers have to do usability testing with something attached to their chairs that delivered shocks if they couldn't find it fast enough, and then give them a variety of browsers and corrective lenses and other handicaps to simulate what their users go through. But I'm a sadist.
Is that to help improve their web design, or just a general "designer-torture" thing?!

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[Anonymous Coward]

A little from column A, a little from column B.

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[Anonymous Coward]

The web is not a visual medium. If you think it is, you don't understand it.

Sorry.

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[HBI]

Pretty typical: reality is too tough to argue about so we throw me to some page that has nothing to do with the issue at hand.

Whatever - history will bear me out on this one. 'accessibility' will be one of those whiner topics people _still_ complain about when I am old and gray, in about 30 or 40 years.

Kind of like racism.

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[Anonymous Coward]

I recall back when wheelchair accesibility was first made a requirement for public places. I remember thinking to myself, "we have to spend all this money just for a few cripples?" Since then, I've raised a few children who I pushed around in strollers, and I was mighty glad for simple accessibility features such as sloping curb cuts in sidewalks.

Or the closed-captions on TV. My hearing is fine, but I turn on the captions anyway. I can watch TV without waking up my roommate. I can read what someone is saying even when they mumble or have an impenetrable accent. Sometimes the captions differ from the spoken script in interesting ways.

Sometimes it's even good for a laugh. This actually happened:

TV weatherman: If you're indoors tonight...
closed caption: IF URINE DOORS TONIGHT...

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[Tsu Dho Nimh]

On a good day ... improve web design.

After a web team meeting, in which I explain for the gazillionth time that web pages using tiny pale blue text on a pale grey background might please the aesthetes in marketing for its but that readable text, like used by our competition, would do more for actual sales ... I'm all for designer torture.

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[iangoldby]

While those are all good examples of nice design using CSS, they all suffer from page-width problems. None of them except inc.com make any attempt to scale to the width of the window, and even inc.com breaks when the window is too narrow.

This is one of my biggest bugbears with CSS design - creating pages that use the whole width of the browser window whatever the window size, and look good at all widths is just so hard. (Of course, with tables, you might as well not even try, but that's not the point.)

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever - history will bear me out on this one. 'accessibility' will be one of those whiner topics people _still_ complain about when I am old and gray, in about 30 or 40 years.

Yup, when you're old and gray and and macular degeneration or other age related disorder has reduced your vision to the point where you can't use the web and you're tooling around in an electric wheelchair looking for a curb cut, people will still be complaining about this issue all right. However, I predict you'll be hypocritically complaining there right along with them.

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[CaptKilljoy]

Whatever - history will bear me out on this one. 'accessibility' will be one of those whiner topics people _still_ complain about when I am old and gray, in about 30 or 40 years.

Yup, when you're old and gray and and macular degeneration or other age related disorder has reduced your vision to the point where you can't use the web and you're tooling around in an electric wheelchair looking for a curb cut, people will still be complaining about this issue all right. However, in all likelihood you'll be hypocritically complaining there right along with them.

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[beetle496]

> The web is a visual medium.

This is an extremely common but ignorant misconception. The web is an information medium. Probably 95% of the accessibility issues and 99% of the functional limitations of the current Internet can be traced back to this deprecated way of thinking. Grok the paradigm shift baby.

If you don't appreciated the difference between <i> and <em> you are not yet ready.

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[NulDevice]

Nothing wrong with nested tables, although so many, many many people abuse them horribly. Do you really need a separate, 1-cell table to make a blue border? Not really. A few nested tables, fine. But in one of my previous employments I had to deal with a site that had *15* levels of table nesting for no reason other than making that box orange and that box yellow. Madness, I tell you, madness.

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[NulDevice]

And I'm one of those people. Far too many sites were marred in the late 90's - and far too many are marred now - by dull sonic wallpaper that serves no purpose other than slowing downloads. Never serves a purpose, always startles the hell out of me when I'm listening to something else and my speakers start blaring some boring floaty synth loops, and...well, it's just annoying.

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[NulDevice]

I'm assuming you stumbled across my personal and/or band site. Yeah, that's a mess. I'm working on it. I'm still in the process of upgrading it from a terribly old-and-out-of date design that didn't take much of that into account.

I tend to be a little more exacting when people are paying me to do this stuff.

Physician, heal thyself. :)

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[NulDevice]

As for the font issue - well, how're you going to resize the text in some site's graphics? Far too many designers decide that their site would look *great* if they use a teeeeeeny font rendered and anti-aliased into a lovely graphic. Can't be resized. Visually-imparied folks are boned. All the IE trickery in the world isn't going to help that too much.

XHTML and CSS aren't really new - CSS1 has been around for several years now, just as long as the more common versions of HTML. And CSS really *doesn't* do the same thing as a font tag. It's kinda like saying "Why should I use C++? It does the same thing as PL/1." While you may love your font tags and nested tables, frankly CSS offers you a lot more design flexibility, helps separate design from content (that way your authors don't screw up your design be accidentally deleting a font tag), allows you to update an entire website at a crack, etc etc. And browser shave been supporting it (albeit some like NS 4 not exactly well) for years. It always surprises me how much some designers struggle against it - it's got so much of what they've been asking for in HTML for years - pixel-level positioning, font control, type spacing, layering, floats, etc etc. Plus you can use multiple targets easily in CSS - one CSS for web, one for voice readers, one for print...it's remarkably handy.

XHTML is pretty much the same as HTML. It's just more strictly codified. Close your tags. Keep your capitalization consistant. Don't try and close nested tags out of order. I fail to see how enforcing proper use of code is a bad thing. If you write good html already, then it probably comes pretty close to validating to XHTML already.

And the final question - most if not all screen readers *can* understand tables just fine. But they're really best for tabular data. Tables used for design purposes alone end up being pretty much irrelevant to a screen-reader at best (nothing lost there); at worst they present the content in a flow that's confusing not to the machine but to the person trying to figure out why paragraph 2 comes before the title. Use CSS layers and you can move stuff around in any visual order, but still keep the logical order of the information preserved.

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[JimDabell]

Pretty typical: reality is too tough to argue about so we throw me to some page that has nothing to do with the issue at hand.

I take it you didn't bother reading the document then? Why should I even bother arguing? It just makes you look stupid and wastes our time.

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[JimDabell]

This is one of my biggest bugbears with CSS design - creating pages that use the whole width of the browser window whatever the window size, and look good at all widths is just so hard.

Well that's just a general problem with web design, not with CSS, tables, or anything like that. At least with CSS you have a bit more flexibility, being able to use the width, min-width, and max-width properties, and being able to specify widths in a number of different units (ems, %, etc). You can "stack" columns with floating elements when the browser window gets narrow too.

Good design is hard, especially in a medium as flexible as the web.

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[iangoldby]

Yes, if only min-width and max-width were more widely supported... Even Konqueror doesn't yet honour them.

Re:Standards? Ok. Compulsory standards? Not ok.

[JimDabell]

I always use ALT tags, but you know - I'll keep my nested tables, thanks. I see absolutely no reason to get rid of them when they've been working just fine for years.

Well that's your decision of course, but you are aware you are relying on non-standard behaviour, aren't you? There's nothing in the specifications that require a pixel-perfect representation of a table in the way you expect. That's the fundamental problem with abusing elements that denote meaning, rather than presentation.

What happens when browsers don't render tables the way they always have? The default look of table elements is quite dated now, perhaps browser vendors want to update the look a little. You think no browsers will ever stray from the table-layout tradition? They already have.

Imagine if there were 'security standards' that told you to leave your computer unplugged from the Internet, because it wasn't very secure.

Well CERT already advise switching off client-side scripting in web browsers.

Why should I have to replace my font tags and tables, that have worked absolutely well for *years*, with some new fangled technology that does the same thing?

You don't have to. It's just there are benefits to doing so. And I don't know where you get the idea that HTML does the same thing as CSS, they are completely different languages with completely different goals.

Dude, if you can't change the font of the site you're reading, try using a decent browser - maybe Internet Explorer.

Internet Explorer won't let you alter the font size when the author has specified it in pts or pxs. Doing the proper thing and using relative sizes makes things a lot better for many people. And no, I don't consider having to fiddle with my font settings every time I go to a new site to be pleasant.

Guess what? Plain old 'current' standards like HTML work well with the vast majority of browsers, are attractive, useable, and pretty damned accessible.

CSS 2 is five years old, it's used in many websites, I would describe it as a current, established technology. Whilst HTML-only sites may be attractive, usable, and accessible, this doesn't mean that this is due to the use of HTML, it means that the sites are that way despite this abuse of HTML.

*Why* can't blind reading software handle tables, hmm?

They can. They just do it in a way you don't like, but in a way that is perfectly sensible when faced with properly-authored websites.

Re:What the fuhhhh....?

[Anonymous Coward]

ooh, high five!

Re:Oh goody

[xenotrout]

Though this was labeled as troll, and I can see why, I can also see the point in it. Some may not, so I will clarify. Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser is horrid about complying to W3C standards, and even creates its own "standards" that some people are more likely to comply to. Maybe this wouldn't be labeled troll if the statement was more like, "This is a great development for the W3C, but seems that, unfortunately, it's not going to do much good. Microsoft has been making web standards useless ever since they 'took control' of the 'browser market,' and they don't seem to care about accessable web pages (WCAG 1.0, US section 508). I did check the document source for an accessable alternative version as the W3C standards would accept instead of the main version being accessable, but they have no alternative versions, even for mobile devices or anything."

When is a standard not a standard?

[bons]

When no one follows it.

Or in some cases, when a standard is so ill-defined as to allow for multiple incompatible interpretations, making it impossible to figure out if you've followed it.

Historically, browsers have consistantly been incompatible, plug-ins have been required to accomplish those things the browsers didn't accomplish, and the goal of content over form has been lost since the <b> tag stuck it's elbow in the <em> tag''s face.

Web site developers, meanwhile, are not only ignorant of the standards, but would be actively encouraged to ignore them by their client even if they knew. The people who build these sites do not care about accessability any more than spammers really care about those people who get mad at the e-mails.

At this point, testing with normal browsers has become impossible, since there are multiple versions of IE, both Mac and PC, on the streets, all of them rendering CSS differently, Mozilla has split yet again, Safari is trying to gain market share, and Opera is still causing web developers to pull their hair out.

And now you want an accessability standard?

I've been a beta tester. I've been a web designer. And I've had an internet account for a decade now. The industry is incapable of following the standards it currently has. It doesn't need new ones. It sure as heck isn't going to follow them. If someone needs an accessabilty guideline, they can use Section 508 for now. It'll do the job until the industry can get it's act together.

Re:When is a standard not a standard?

[__past__]

At this point, testing with normal browsers has become impossible, since there are multiple versions of IE, both Mac and PC, on the streets, all of them rendering CSS differently, Mozilla has split yet again, Safari is trying to gain market share, and Opera is still causing web developers to pull their hair out.

And now you want an accessability standard?

"Accessible" also means accessible for people with different browsers. If you follow the WAI guidelines, your site will work OK in all of them, not only in voice browsers und other weird stuff, but also Opera, IE and Konqueror.

The whole WAI idea can basically be summarized in two rules: "Provide as much information as possible - it will help someone, even if most will ignore it" and "Don't rely on bugs in specific implementations, code to the specs". It's just about being sane.

Give me any AA site, and I'm pretty sure that I'll be able to use it with weird browsers the author might not even know about. It might look different, but it's usable. If you need print layout, you know where to find it, just accept that HTML isn't for you.

Re:When is a standard not a standard?

[bons]

"code to the specs"

Whose specs? Theirs? Why? Who really cares? The groups that do take them seriously are the exception, not the rule. For all intents and purposes, w3.org is the Pope of the net: outspoken, clueless, talked about, but for the most part, ignored.

Web designers are not paid by w3.org. Their clients (who do pay them) don't care about w3.org. The clients customers have probably never heard of w3.org. The vast majority of the net simply doesn't care.

I coded sites to existing standards 3 years ago. Those sites no longer meet standards today simply because I haven't updated them on a regular basis just to keep up with an ever changing set of "standards". I attemped to code to existing CSS "standards" 2 years ago only to discover that the browser interpretation of those "standards" was so unpredictable as to make the attempt pointless. And now you want an accessability standard? Why? In a year it will be gone and forgotten.

When w3.org reads the cluetrain manifesto, and gets it, let me know. Until then I'll do what I should have done years ago and ignore them like I do the Pope.

Re:When is a standard not a standard?

[JimDabell]

Whose specs? Theirs? Why?

For interoperability.

Their clients (who do pay them) don't care about w3.org

They care when their website breaks. They care when they find out they are breaking the law (accessibility is legally required for many people).

I attemped to code to existing CSS "standards" 2 years ago only to discover that the browser interpretation of those "standards" was so unpredictable as to make the attempt pointless.

Times change. Netscape 4.x and Internet Explorer 4.x are close to being dead, which eliminates a hell of a lot of problems.

Re:When is a standard not a standard?

[Aquitaine]

In all those ten long years, did you ever compare Section 508 to the WAI?

They are nearly identical. The WAI has some things that 508 does not and 508 has things that the WAI does not, but they're mostly small things.

As far as 508 is concerned, many government web sites that are required to follow it don't. There is no government organization that you can call and have 508 explained to a luddite, or to a web designer. (so we do it, usually.)

Many companies are plunking down tens of thousands of dollars for accessibility and usability tests. This is a growing market.

Your statement that 'testing with normal browsers has become impossible' is incorrect. Many people do it. I suggest you find the css-d list (moderated by Eric Meyer) and watch as your mailbox fills up with people who are doing precisely that. It's a pain, sure, but for those of us whose job it is to care about such things, it is very much possible.

Re:When is a standard not a standard?

[beetle496]

> There is no government organization that you can call and have 508 explained to a luddite, or to a web designer.

Well, one could try Standards for Electronic and Information Technology: An Overview or What does Section 508 mean to You? for starters.

It isn't just wheelchairs that go up ramps.

[DrSkwid]

To me it looks like my site does okay.

One interesting thing I found with a few seconds fumbling was the use of

on this page
http://bobby.cast.org/bobby/html/en/gls/g109 .html

recently I was reading XHTML stuff and noticed that if you want to be forward thinking any new stuff you create would be better off chosing as xhtml requires it.

and I thought back to all the times I've had to write special case code to deal with "checked", if only I'd known.

The tips I have read mostly, for me anyway, deal with filling in default values for html attributes that have been "optional" such as adding summaries for tables and th values. I think this is best practice for many a website anyway. Meta information is great for seach engines and search engine referrals, for many of us, are our life-blood.

So it is not as "access for the disabled" that this stuff really comes under. Proper categorization and labelling of documents improves the relationship between all users.

grep < hey did you mean etrans?

[DrSkwid]

curse you etrans

<input ... checked>

and <input ... checked="checked">

is what i was on about

The Web is not a visual medium

[LiamQ]

This really annoyes me. The web is a visual medium. It should not be compulsory to cater for those that can't benefit from a visual medium, in a visual medium.

The Web is not a visual medium. Yes, it contains a lot of visual content, but there's also plenty of text content that can be presented just fine in a non-visual manner.

As a Web author, your role is to describe the structure of the content. If you use proper markup, such as H1 for headings and P for paragraphs, then browsers can present your content in an appropriate manner whether it be visual or non-visual.

The Web still consists mostly of text content, and there's nothing visual about that. (Yes, I know about porn, but there's still plenty of text content even there.)

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[RobotWisdom]

As a Web author, your role is to describe the structure of the content. If you use proper markup, such as H1 for headings and P for paragraphs, then browsers can present your content in an appropriate manner whether it be visual or non-visual.

Goldfarb's Conjecture has been repeated so often and so mindlessly that everyone's forgotten it's a hypothesis about human cognition that's never actually been tested. Do writers and/or readers really organise a text as a hierarchy of nested structural containers, and then secondarily apply styles to those structures? Are there such structures for every style, and are they defined independently of the styles? Does a blind-reader really benefit from EM instead of I, or from P instead of BR-BR?

The emperor's-new-clothes quality is even clearer when you look at the Semantic Web ideal of tagging semantic components like dates or phone-numbers-- these almost never have distinctive markup styles, so the creaking mechanism of Goldfarbian markup is massive overkill.

Just using simple, clear visual markup is as accessible as anything else. HTML 2.0 forever!

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[LiamQ]

Tagging a phone number would be extremely useful for the many new smartphones and phone/PDA combos that include a Web browser. Then those browsers could allow you to easily call the number, send an SMS/MMS, or add the number to your address book.

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[mrd_yaddayadda]

The Web is not a visual medium. Yes, it contains a lot of visual content, but there's also plenty of text content that can be presented just fine in a non-visual manner.

Right. This is like saying "A car is not a means of transportation. Yes I can use it for transport, but I can also use it to house my pot plants." Well of course I can do that, but that is stretching the useage to a new area and beyond it's designed for purpose.

And just note that I didn't say accessibility standards were a bad thing. I said makeing them compulsory is.

The Web still consists mostly of text content, and there's nothing visual about that.

I'm wondering what written text is, if not visual...

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[Rits]

HTML 2.0 and the Strict variant HTML 4.01/XHTML 1.0 (which have the same vocabulary of elements) are not so far apart. It's the crud that got inserted in between (FONT, color and align attributes) that we're better off without, now that CSS support is quite decent in 95% of the browsers used. CSS makes webdesign easier, especially when you don't have to think about Netscape 4 compatability.

Separation of structure and style not only makes your work easier. It will also make a difference for blind users when tool builders can actually count on it.

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[RobotWisdom]

Tagging a phone number would be extremely useful

Certainly, I'm all in favor of semantic markup, but Goldfarb's Conjecture that styles should naturally be layered on top of these semantics is just deluded, imho. (The best approach to semantic markup would even be visible to screen scrapers, I think.)

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[LiamQ]

The Web is not a visual medium. Yes, it contains a lot of visual content, but there's also plenty of text content that can be presented just fine in a non-visual manner.

Right. This is like saying "A car is not a means of transportation. Yes I can use it for transport, but I can also use it to house my pot plants." Well of course I can do that, but that is stretching the useage to a new area and beyond it's designed for purpose.

The designed-for purpose of the Web wasn't visual at all. That's clear from the first chapter of Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor .

I'm wondering what written text is, if not visual...

Written text is just content. You can present it visually in a dead-tree book or on a computer screen, or you can have it spoken to you, or you can read it using a Braille tactile feedback device.

There's nothing visual about the comment that I'm writing now. There's no reason why it can't be read aloud or through a Braille device.

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[JimDabell]

The Web is not a visual medium. Yes, it contains a lot of visual content, but there's also plenty of text content that can be presented just fine in a non-visual manner.

Right. This is like saying "A car is not a means of transportation. Yes I can use it for transport, but I can also use it to house my pot plants." Well of course I can do that, but that is stretching the useage to a new area and beyond it's designed for purpose.

Actually, normal HTML is perfectly accessible to most people, including people with visual difficulties. It's when you start ignoring the specifications or adding extras like Javascript, CSS and Flash that you have the potential to screw up.

So, a better analogy would be to draw the distinction between saying the latest Britney Spears song is a CD, and the latest Britney Spears song is available on CD. Yes, the vast majority of people might buy the CD, but that doesn't mean it isn't available in other formats, like DVD-Audio.

I'm wondering what written text is, if not visual...

Ever heard of braille?

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[RobotWisdom]

Separation of structure and style not only makes your work easier.

There's no reason to burden the published page with authoring hints.

It will also make a difference for blind users when tool builders can actually count on it.

I think this oft-repeated claim is a hoax.

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[JimDabell]

I'm not familiar with Goldfarb's conjecture, but the person you are replying to isn't talking about human cognition. It's about presenting content appropriately. Unless you are arguing that the same presentation is always suitable for everyone, or that you can easily convert one presentation into another, I don't see what your point is.

Does a blind-reader really benefit from EM instead of I,

All visitors do if the search engine they use pays more attention to emphasized text.

or from P instead of BR-BR?

Series of <br> elements should render as a single linebreak in conformant user-agents. Do you think that whitespace has no effect on the readability of a document?

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[mrd_yaddayadda]

Actually, normal HTML is perfectly accessible to most people, including people with visual difficulties. It's when you start ignoring the specifications or adding extras like Javascript, CSS and Flash that you have the potential to screw up.

What spec are you talking about there? Last I knew Javascript(ECMAScript) and CSS were part of many specs.

Ever heard of braille?

Braille isn't a visual medium, the visual artifact is a side effect of it's mechanism of transferral of information.

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[JimDabell]

Actually, normal HTML is perfectly accessible to most people, including people with visual difficulties. It's when you start ignoring the specifications or adding extras like Javascript, CSS and Flash that you have the potential to screw up.

What spec are you talking about there? Last I knew Javascript(ECMAScript) and CSS were part of many specs.

I'm not following you. Normal HTML, such as HTML 4.01. Javascript, CSS and Flash are not part of normal HTML.

Ever heard of braille?

Braille isn't a visual medium, the visual artifact is a side effect of it's mechanism of transferral of information.

That was exactly my point. Read the exchange again:

I'm wondering what written text is, if not visual...

Ever heard of braille?

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[mrd_yaddayadda]

Ever heard of braille? Braille isn't a visual medium, the visual artifact is a side effect of it's mechanism of transferral of information. That was exactly my point. Read the exchange again: I'm wondering what written text is, if not visual... Ever heard of braille?

It feels like we're going in a recursive loop here...

Speaking book. Auditory.
Braille. Tactile.
Text. Visual.

All can transfer the same information, yes of course. All three rely on different mediums and senses. The internet is akin to reading a book, but without the paper. It is visual. It can be extended but at it's core it is visual. This isn't difficult.

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[RobotWisdom]

I'm not familiar with Goldfarb's conjecture,

Goldfarb invented SGML, and initiated the theory that structures naturally precede styles.

but the person you are replying to isn't talking about human cognition. It's about presenting content appropriately.

It's only appropriate if it conforms to human cognition.

[Does a blind-reader really benefit from EM instead of I,]
All visitors do if the search engine they use pays more attention to emphasized text.

So you're trying to use this arbitrary choice to justify Goldfarb???

Series of BR elements should render as a single linebreak in conformant user-agents.

I'm sure you're thinking of Ps, but either way it's insanely anti-human. Multiple Ps should absolutely skip extra lines.

Do you think that whitespace has no effect on the readability of a document?

It's you and TimBL that are denigrating whitespace, not me.

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[LiamQ]

The internet is akin to reading a book, but without the paper. It is visual. It can be extended but at it's core it is visual.

You haven't stated why you think the Internet is visual. You just keep insisting that it must be so. Can you give any reasons to back up your claim?

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[JimDabell]

Goldfarb invented SGML, and initiated the theory that structures naturally precede styles.

I know who he is, I'm just unfamiliar with his Conjecture.

but the person you are replying to isn't talking about human cognition. It's about presenting content appropriately.

It's only appropriate if it conforms to human cognition.

But the presentation of the document to the end user is a completely different topic to the file format applications use to transfer information to each other.

All visitors do if the search engine they use pays more attention to emphasized text.

So you're trying to use this arbitrary choice to justify Goldfarb???

Please re-read my post, it seems you are arguing all by yourself. I'm saying nothing about Goldfarb. You asked if there was a benefit to using <em> for emphasis instead of misusing <i>. I pointed out one tangible benefit.

Series of BR elements should render as a single linebreak in conformant user-agents.

I'm sure you're thinking of Ps, but either way it's insanely anti-human. Multiple Ps should absolutely skip extra lines.

No, I'm thinking of the <br> element type. How is it "insanely anti-human"? End-users don't read the raw HTML, they care about how it is presented to them.

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[RobotWisdom]

I know who he is, I'm just unfamiliar with his Conjecture.

It's just my pun on Goldbach's Conjecture in math.

the presentation of the document to the end user is a completely different topic to the file format applications use to transfer information to each other.

I think you're making a cognitive claim, even there (about the cognitive relationship between structures and styles).

I'm saying nothing about Goldfarb. You asked if there was a benefit to using EM for emphasis instead of misusing I. I pointed out one tangible benefit.

Your claim of 'misuse' is a variant on Goldfarb's Conjecture. But the 'value' you claim is derived purely from an arbitrary choice by an imaginary search-engineeer, so it holds no water for me.

How is it "insanely anti-human"?

If someone authoring HTML by hand wants to skip some whitespace, multiple Ps (or BRs) is an entirely natural and reasonable way to do it. The W3C in their geekissimost devotion to Goldfarb have declared that empty paragraphs are illogical, and forced much less intuitive solutions.

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[Tsu Dho Nimh]

"Do writers and/or readers really organise a text as a hierarchy of nested structural containers, and then secondarily apply styles to those structures? Are there such structures for every style, and are they defined independently of the styles?"

GOOD writers are well aware of the structure of information, how structure affects comprehension, and how proper use of structure can make writing easier. If the writer does her job, the readers don't notice a thing except that they can find the information they want easily. HTML was well on its way to being a nice structural language for the web when some damned fools decided that they wanted to have control over the appearance and stuck in all the appearance tags. If they had continued the SGML tradition and adopted CSS, we'de be far better off.

A point for any web developer to consider ... a page creator's use of HTML influences search engine rankings. Feed the search robot a properly structured document that uses the tags the way they were intended (H1 instead of FONT=+5), heirarchical structure, etc., and the page will show up better than a page with identical content that uses FONT and other just-for-looks tricks and has no structure under the hood. One of my sidelines is remodelling web sites to improve their search engine listings, and doing nothing more than using structured HTML can move them up in the ranks.

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[Tsu Dho Nimh]

The most important visitors your site will have are BLIND. They are the search site robot, and the indexing software. A well-build page with CSS and good structure will be higher in the results than the same information presented on a page with no structural elements and just the "appearance" tags like FONT. I've tested this repeatedly over the years, and it still works.

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm, some damn wierd logic you have. Try this:

A book contains information.

It may have been written with a pen, a typewriter, a braillewriter, a wordprocessor, etc. But this is irrelevant, it was just the means to author the information.

When "reading" this book it doesn't matter HOW that information is conveyed to the reader, be it auditory, tactile, or visual, as long as the reader can understand the information contained within.

So, if the web is a means to convey information (which it IS) then it is definitely not just a visual media. You have a very blinkered view if that's all you think it is.

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[JimDabell]

I think you're making a cognitive claim, even there (about the cognitive relationship between structures and styles).

So you are arguing that HTML is bad because authoring in it isn't intuitive? This is a separate issue to the benefits of said structuring when applied as an interoperable file format. There is no requirement of actually authoring in HTML, you can author however you like as long as you can parse the information out of it appropriately with some program before publishing it.

But the 'value' you claim is derived purely from an arbitrary choice by an imaginary search-engineeer, so it holds no water for me.

There's nothing arbitrary about it. <em> means emphasis. <i> means italics. Following these definitions would obviously mean treating keywords residing within <em> elements as being more important. There's nothing imaginary about the search engineer, there are search engines out there that behave in this way.

There isn't a one-to-one relationship between <em> and <i> according to the specifications. It's fairly clear that lots of people have this confused, and ignore the specifications, but that doesn't mean there are no benefits to authoring correctly, or that the basic theory is unsound.

If someone authoring HTML by hand wants to skip some whitespace, multiple Ps (or BRs) is an entirely natural and reasonable way to do it.

You aren't thinking at the right level. The author doesn't want to add some whitespace because he has Enter Key Tourette's - there is a reason for adding the whitespace. The method of adding the whitespace depends on that reason.

For instance, if there is a menubar at the top, and the author wants to separate the text from the menubar, it makes far more sense to simply put a margin between the two:

#menu { margin-bottom: 3em; }

On the other hand, if the author merely prefers the look of spaced out paragraphs, it makes more sense to add margins to paragraphs:

p { margin: 1.5em; }

But, again, authoring in this style is not mandatory. It would be trivial to write a preprocessor that counted consecutive <br> elements, removed them from the stream, added an id to the following element, and included a { margin-top: xem; } in the stylesheet.

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[RobotWisdom]

You aren't thinking at the right level. The author doesn't want to add some whitespace because he has Enter Key Tourette's - there is a reason for adding the whitespace. The method of adding the whitespace depends on that reason.

Finally, you've nailed Goldfarb's Conjecture-- the untested hypothesis about the cognitive processes of authors. (That's what I reject.)

People don't really have structures in mind when they write, they arrange styles and whitespace to present their ideas as clearly as possible. I might try any old experiment that the medium allows, but Goldfarb wants to deny me that natural right.

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[Isofarro]

Speaking book. Auditory.

Braille. Tactile.

Text. Visual.

The last one is most certainly incorrect. It should be:

Monitor. Visual.
Speakers. Aural
Refreshable Braille Display. Tactile

Now, dial up the the net using your modem. request a page, and now pick up your connected phone. Listen. Notice you can hear the data being sent, although you can't see it. The TCP/IP stack takes the packets and reconstructs the requested resource. At this point, you get to choose how this resource is represented. you can pick a graphical editor which takes the resource data and display it on a screen, or you can decide to pipe it into a speech reader which then reads it to you.

You choose to see the text, you can also chose to listen to it. It is not forced, and your choice cannot be forced on others.

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[rshugart]

Does a blind-reader really benefit
from EM instead of I, or from P instead of BR-BR?

Beeing blind, I feel uniquely qualified to comment here. Yes, absolutely the blind person does benefit from proper markup! In fact, if you use proper markup, you will go a long way twoards making an accessible site. Perhaps an example is in order here.

First off, like most other blind people I know, I use IE as the underlying browser. Unfortunately at this time, its the only one that supports accessibility to any real extent for a blind person. IE actually passes all page information to a screen reader, in my case Window-Eyes, which then reformats the information into a method I can use. I can move around a page by links, headings, paragraphs, etc. Many times, for example, if I'm trying to get an over view of the page, I just jump from heading to heading to get an over view of how things are layed out, and then can read just what I want to read. If something starts to get borring, fine, just jump to the next heading. Also, Window-eyes automatically expands acronym and abreviation tags, so I strongly recomend using them. My software can even use language attributes on a page to make sure parts of the page are read in the proper language. So to summarize, proper markup is crutial. In fact, it and alt tags are my two biggest issues.

For more info on just how this works, you can take a look at this page describing just how these navigation features work, and even download a demo so you can try it for yourself and see just how it works.

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[KjetilK]

I'm enjoying your exchange here, it is very enlightening.

Finally, you've nailed Goldfarb's Conjecture-- the untested hypothesis about the cognitive processes of authors. (That's what I reject.)

OK, I see your point now.

It may indeed be that you are correct, it is not easy for an author to write structured rather than visual content. In the real world we see that the WYSIWYG doctrine is hugely more widespread than structured markup. Even though programs like M$ Word have a styles concept, people are hardly using them, and when you look at web content, it is very rare to see good, structured markup.

All this real-world experience could be interpreted as you being right, and Goldfarb (whose Conjecture I haven't seen before) being wrong. It could be only me and a few others who actually enjoy writing structured documents, and find it so much better.

However, I don't think you can deny that if people would write structured markup I would be extremely useful. Jim's example that search engines could use it to rank hits by looking at the content of em elements (AltaVista did this in the old days, when people still wrote reasonably structured), is a good one. There are more things that read web pages than are human. Or at least it should be that way. But let's be human for a moment: In writings where I come from, you'll hardly see a paragraph beginning with a new line. You'll see it indented with a cm. The visual appearance of a document is largely dependent on cultural conventions. If the p element had been used widely, such cultural conventions could be taken into account by using culturally dependent stylesheets. You can't do that by using two br's. But that's still visual.

What I really want to see, are user agents that are able to fetch information for me, present digests. For example, I once tried to hack a script that would fetch me an abstract of whole-page comments that dialy appear in Norwegian newspapers. I had to give up, because the markup that was used was so hard to make sense out of what was the menus, navigational links, ads and so on, and what was the actual content. If title of the content had been marked up with a h1, this task would be, if not trivial, so at least reasonably easy. It is of course the author's prerogative to provide me with what he wants, but if the author had been interested in advancing technology and culture while he was at it, he could have provided me with markup so that I could have run may script.

So, the question is: Should we just settle with "no advances in this field are possible, people just can't write structured", or should we try to educate them?

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[KjetilK]

All can transfer the same information, yes of course. All three rely on different mediums and senses. The internet is akin to reading a book, but without the paper. It is visual. It can be extended but at it's core it is visual. This isn't difficult.

You're starting to sound like a legislator to me ;-) (uhm, sorry, that must be one of the most offending things one could write on /. I don't really mean it that hard.)

For one thing, let's not talk about the Internet as a whole. You can do VoIP over the Internet. That's not visual. Let's talk about the web.

But when you're saying that it is visual, you're denying those that are more creative than yourself the right to be just that. That's what happens when a legislator tries to make a law for a medium they don't understand.

When the web was invented, it's intention was to extend very far beyond the visual. It has been dumbed down to being mostly visual, that's true. But what we now have is a very small subset of what it was intended to be. It has all happened because of closed-mindedness, because a majority has never tried to envision a web that you're not reading on a screen. Just try this: Imagine lying back in your favorite chair, listening to the web, and talking to the browser, telling it what links to use?

You don't think it would be cool? Well, I do, and it would have been reality by now if it hadn't been for a bunch of overpaid "web designers" whose main concern was enlarging their ego by presenting pages that looked cool on their own screens. Don't you dare telling me that I shouldn't have the option of listening to web pages!

But again, I'm not meaning this as hard as I write it. I'm just venting frustrations... :-)

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[Isofarro]

Do writers and/or readers really organise a text as a hierarchy of nested structural containers

*pulls a random book off a shelf* Look, each page has a page number. There's a table of contents at the start. There are even breaks called chapters and sections. Paging through, there's different type of headings, and there's even an index at the back.

Heck, the book can actually be read in a sequential fashion, reading the pages in an ascending fashion. Heck every page can be linearly read starting from the top-left, reading each line from left to right and top-to-bottom.

Is that isn't organised and hierachial structured text, then you don't know what is.

Looking at other books, wow - the same style and organisation.

Finnegan's Wake is just one book written by a drug-induced fogey. The world doesn't revolve around it.

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[Isofarro]

There's no reason to burden the published page with authoring hints.

That is indeed your choice which can be forced for your ecstatic pleasure by disabling stylesheets in your browser and supplementing it with your own stylesheet with your preferences to render content exactly how you prefer it.

However, I disagree with you entirely, yet I don't force my choice on you. Please consider respecting the readers of website before continuing your ongoing puffery.

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[RobotWisdom]

If the p element had been used widely, such cultural conventions could be taken into account by using culturally dependent stylesheets.

Where Goldfarb erred, imho, is in thinking that styles are arbitrary/secondary/inferior, and structures are absolute and superior. But styles are actually expressive, so revising them wholesale via stylesheets actually changes the impact of the document. Mediocre authors won't mind, perhaps, but serious authors should care how the document looks, and not surrender the details to a mechanical whim.

the markup that was used was so hard to make sense out of

I have a longterm project to solve this, generally: [theory]

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[Isofarro]

If someone authoring HTML by hand wants to skip some whitespace, multiple Ps (or BRs) is an entirely natural and reasonable way to do it.

Empty paragraphs are meaningless - much like your "Goldfarb's Conjecture". Its a pity your "proposed solutions" are nothing more than unrealistic over-hyped expecations largely derived from the wasteland that is Artificial Intelligence. In case you hadn't noticed, people are rather tired of waiting for you AI wunderkinds to produce something the real world can use right now.

Your jealousy of Tim Berners Lee is evident enough - pity you are incapable of producing something the real world can use. That's something Tim's already done, and a decade later its still globally used and still gaining popularity in every corner of the world.

When can we expect your little brain child to materialise?

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[Isofarro]

Goldfarb's Conjecture-- the untested hypothesis about the cognitive processes of authors. (That's what I reject.)

And your non-existant fantasy totally dependant on the unmaterialised AI solutions is better how?

I can use the web right now to search for stuff, and it returns me a decent amount of well structured information. It works.

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[RobotWisdom]

There are even breaks called chapters and sections.

But are there ever semantic/structural/stylistic units that overlap paragraph/section/chapter boundaries? Are there ever odd little exceptions that the creative authors have thrown in, with no pre-existing theory about what level of structure they embody?

Finnegans Wake [no apostrophe, sweetie] is just one book written by a drug-induced fogey.

White wine is not a drug, and 41yo is not a fogey. [info]

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[Isofarro]

But are there ever semantic/structural/stylistic units that overlap paragraph/section/chapter boundaries?

Paragraphs, sections and chapters are structural units. Even a book is a structural unit. A page is also a structure. Sentences are structure, they contain a linear sequence of words. Even words themselves have structure. Language also has structure.

Without structure you have nothing that can be efficiently reused or passed on.

Even the priests of the Middle Ages understand the value of structured information.

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[Isofarro]

that styles should naturally be layered on top of these semantics is just deluded, imho

Can you provide a cohesive and plain English explanation as to why. Certainly the entire print industry is fashioned along the same concept, and they seem to be running along all fine and dandy.

The best approach to semantic markup would even be visible to screen scrapers

An infeasible and unworkable solution with no realistic possibility of existing within our lifetime. The solution you mock (of semantic markup) is one that works right now and delivers benefits to users, businesses and governments today.

Better something that does the job today over something that will never exists. Pragmatism!

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[Isofarro]

Goldfarb invented SGML, and initiated the theory that structures naturally precede styles.

False. This practice of structuring first and styling after predates Goldfarb and even the print industry. I can trace an immediate path of this practice all the way back to the Middle Ages. I expect pre-historians and archeologists can trace it back even further. Even to way before the early Egyptian civilisation. Its nothing new.

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[Isofarro]

People don't really have structures in mind when they write

This is clearly not true. Every serious author has a plan of the structure before they start writing. Fiction is well known for the preplanning work required to structure the story around plots and subplots, plus the detailed working out of characters before the first chapters are written.

Two massive examples. Tolkien worked out most of Middle Earth before he started writing Lord of the Rings. He worked out life and time lines, histories and myths. Even invented languages and alphabets and songs before the first chapter was even written. The story followed a pre-set plan.

Example 2 is David and Leigh Eddings Belgariad and Mallorean sagas. All the preplanning and structure was described and laid out in their complementing work: "The Rivan Codex". They spent months detailling their created world working out histories, major events and timelines.

Most typical writers start their articles by creating an outline first. When thet write, they stick to this outline. Whatever James Joyce decides to do is not what typically happens in the real world.

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[Isofarro]

However, I don't think you can deny that if people would write structured markup I would be extremely useful. Jim's example that search engines could use it to rank hits by looking at the content of em elements (AltaVista did this in the old days, when people still wrote reasonably structured), is a good one.

Google is experimenting with a number of structual-based searches. On http://labs.google.com there are two searches based on structural markup.

Google Sets is based on list structures.

Google Glossary is based on definition lists, abbreviation, acronym and definition markup.

Your wish for a digest of articles is structurally nothing more than an outline created using the header elements.

The benefits of structural markup are there, there's just not enough structural markup around yet.

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[Anonymous Coward]

White wine is not a drug

Difficult to see how you could argue that one. I guess you could be splitting hairs with some distinction between alcohol being a drug and wine merely containing it but it doesn't seem terribly convincing.

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[Isofarro]

Mediocre authors won't mind, perhaps, but serious authors should care how the document looks, and not surrender the details to a mechanical whim.

Again, this is not even reflected in the real world. An article writer writes structured articles for publications. It is the designers job to style it as best fits the publication, not the author. This is what happens in the real world.

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[Isofarro]

Right. This is like saying "A car is not a means of transportation.

Wrong. Your argument is like saying that only cars use roads. Clearly false, since all manner of wheeled vehicles use roads - whether or not you personally have used one.

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[KjetilK]

Mediocre authors won't mind, perhaps, but serious authors should care how the document looks, and not surrender the details to a mechanical whim.

Well, indeed they should care, but they should not dictate. It is I who knows best what is best for me. An excellent author working with an excellent typographer and an excellent designer should be able to hint how a page should look, and when it loads, I might just agree. However, if it is my opinion that the lines are too long, if they are stopping me from changing the number of words on a line, then they have made a very severe mistake, IMNSHO.

It is also very important to keep in mind that people are different, so a one-size-fits-all-solution will be inadequate. An excellent author will have to come up with many different layouts to accomodate for the needs of different people, if he fails to do so, means, to me at least, that he does not care how a page looks for his audience.

Besides, there is nothing wrong with an author writing his own stylesheet, is it?

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[RobotWisdom]

Every serious author has a plan of the structure before they start writing.

First, most webpages are not structured into paragraphs and chapters-- they're many diverse bits of semi-related text arranged by intuition.

But here's a really simple counterexample: you're rereading something you just wrote, and you notice that the single space between two paragraphs is too narrow-- you want to widen it to express a logical jump, or a chronological one.

So should you have to go back and insert a new layer of structure between paragraphs and chapters? Why not just skip the extra line? A true Goldfarbian should define the new structure as something ideal, absolute and eternal, with the style applied separately. But in actual fact, the style comes first, and the structure is a hypothetical afterthought.

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[Isofarro]

First, most webpages are not structured into paragraphs and chapters

Your quote was about authors - people who write. (Clue: the word "author"). People who write for a living structure their work. So do people who seriously write for the web. We are not talking about webpages devoted to pet cockroaches here.

really simple counterexample...

Improving a logical structure does not mean the structure wasn't planned out in the first place. It just means an improvement to the structure was made. Sheesh, this ain't a binary construct!

But in actual fact, the style comes first, and the structure is a hypothetical afterthought.

This is quite false, as over a millenia of history has already proved. I've already explained this to you elsewhere on this page, and you have not produced anything remotely approaching proof of your ridiculous assertion.

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[Isofarro]

[Retrieving updated website items]

I have a longterm project to solve this, generally: [theory]

No need. Its already done. Its called RSS. Its a way of syndicating new items on a website. When you use an RSS aggregator it periodically requests an update from the website, bringing new items to your attention within one update cycle.

Major news sites and web logs are already using this technology. Recently the BBC and Rolling Stone added RSS feeds to their websites. The New York Times has been using RSS feeds for quite some time already.

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[RobotWisdom]

This practice of structuring first and styling after predates Goldfarb and even the print industry. I can trace an immediate path of this practice all the way back to the Middle Ages. I expect pre-historians and archeologists can trace it back even further. Even to way before the early Egyptian civilisation.

Me too:

2500 BC: papyrus and ink for writing; red ink indicates headings, new paragraphs

560 BC: Anaximander 1st book in prose

450 BC: Protagoras classifies sentences as wishes, questions, statements, or commands; Damon analyses iambs, trochees, dactyls

300 BC: Zeno distinguishes phonetics, morphology, semantics, syntax

270 BC: Chrysippus distinguishes 5 cases for nouns: nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, vocative

250 BC: Romans innovate serifs for inscriptions

240 BC: Callimachus's 'Pinakes' alphabetises authors in Alexandria library

77 AD: 1st abstracts of literature, for Pliny

250 AD: books (codex format) replacing scrolls

400 AD: 'Vergil Augusteus' 1st manuscript with decorative initial letters

789 AD: Charlemagne standardises on Alcuin's 'Carolingian miniscule' as official letter-forms of empire (early lowercase)

1000 AD: books use cursive script, alphabetical keywords, subject-indexing, underlining and varying letter-sizes to highlight commentary and section-divisions

1463: 1st title page, for Vatican

1467: 1st printed index

1470: 1st printed page-numbers

1500: parentheses invented

1501: 1st italics in Aldus Manutius's Virgil

1534: 1st printed comma in English

1553: 1st printed exclamation mark in English

1587: 1st printed asterisk and question-mark in England

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[Isofarro]

2500 BC: papyrus and ink for writing; red ink indicates headings, new paragraphs

There you go. Style (red ink) layered on top of a structure (headings). Structure first, style later.

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[RobotWisdom]

There you go. Style (red ink) layered on top of a structure (headings). Structure first, style later.

No, the scribes messed about with red ink, trying different things, and headings was the one that seemed most 'right'. The structure couldn't even be conceived until a style existed that could express it.

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[asdfghjklqwertyuiop]

But in actual fact, the style comes first, and the structure is a hypothetical afterthought.

That doesn't make any sense to me. If i'm writing something that has the chronological jump you describe, it was the structure - the jump - that came first, and the linebreak is the afterthought. I didn't just write something and decide arbitrarily to put an extra line break in to make it look nice. I put the linebreak in because of the structure of the document. Not vice versa.

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[arose]

You are the idiot that invented HTML mail?!

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[Isofarro]

the scribes messed about with red ink, trying different things,

The citation you provide makes no mention of this assertion. It even provides a passage that indicates the presence of structure - a reusable structure:

"The earliest type of text commonly used in private tombs was the 'offering given by the king' (hetep-di-nisut) formula. It was a short prayer ..."

prayer - structure.

And again in the very next paragraph:

"In the Fifty Dynasty [2465-2322 BC] autobiographical texts developed further to include episodes illustrating the tomb-owner's character and describe his memorable achievements"

Episodes - that is a structure.

And going even further back, before your first reference of 2500B.C.

" The Pyramid Texts were a collection of Egyptian mortuary prayers, hymns, and spells intended to protect a dead king or queen and ensure life and sustenance in the hereafter. The texts, inscribed on the walls of the inner chambers of the pyramids [from c. 2686-c. 2160 BC] ... The texts constitute the oldest surviving body of Egyptian religious and funerary writings available to modern scholars."

Prayers, hymns, and spells, what a structured collection of writings! They were used as part of a ritual - yet another organised structure.

The more I read from this website the more evidence of structured text I see.

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[JimDabell]

Speaking book. Auditory.

[...]

The internet is akin to reading a book

And you've just implied that books are not necessarily visual in nature. Do you have reasoning behind your assertion that the web is visual, or is it just that you've only ever experienced the web in a visual way?

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[JimDabell]

But here's a really simple counterexample: you're rereading something you just wrote, and you notice that the single space between two paragraphs is too narrow-- you want to widen it to express a logical jump, or a chronological one.

So should you have to go back and insert a new layer of structure between paragraphs and chapters?

The structure is already altered. You just need a way of expressing this in the written document. My argument is that basing this expression around a visual effect that means something to the author rather than an objective standard that is easy to learn is a poor representation of structure, as it's harder to process by a computer and not as useful in different contexts.

Re:The Web is not a visual medium

[JimDabell]

People don't really have structures in mind when they write, they arrange styles and whitespace to present their ideas as clearly as possible.

But if they are dividing their ideas up into discrete sections, that is structure, whether it's done with blank lines or <p> elements. The representation is less useful when it is meaningless outside of a human's perception though.

goat.sx tab

[Anonymous Coward]

nuff said.

Laxism in webpage building programs

[ptaff]

Trouble is, as long as the mainstream webpage building programs (Frontpage, Dreamweaver, ...) don't catch up, web is going to be a horrid place for non-visual media.

Usually artists who design the visual part of a web page don't want to spawn Vim - they use these graphical tools which rarely comply even to HTML4/tagsoup. Table layouts are so commonplace even today and these documents make no sense structurally.

And a lot of artists prefer using Shockwave/Flash to build pages: they get more control. That way, you really make sure that accessibility is lost.

To comply with even WAI-A asks a lot from the web-builder, although when you think of it, it makes sense even for visual public (like: hyperlinks with the same title should point to the same URL).

But we're so used to the web: the place where structure/syntax is inimportant... and it's so easy!

Re:Laxism in webpage building programs

[fiiz]

I have yet to see an Dreamweaver page that doesn't pass the w3c validation engine.
It's really not that bad--I don't speak for frontpage, which is microsoft junk anyways...

The truth is that making a document accessible is hard, and expensive. It's extra work...and you know how that goes. It's very hard, if not impossible for a piece of software to add metadata for you (think of alt image tags.)

Re:Laxism in webpage building programs

[Isofarro]

as long as the mainstream webpage building programs (Frontpage, Dreamweaver, ...) don't catch up, web is going to be a horrid place for non-visual media.

So what creates websites, the tool or the user of the tool? If the tool is creating the website, why is anyone paying a web designer? If the web designer is creating the site using tools that produce inaccessible markup, why is the designer using a broken tool.

To me it is the web designer's responsibility to select tools that do the job. Don't blame the tool, blame the web designer - he should know better.

Re:Another Useless doc from a Useless Comittee

[trout_fish]

Hmmmm, difficult one this. I think the W3C might just be the people that invented the web. I might be wrong, but I think they have a reasonable right to talk about it.

Re:Another Useless doc from a Useless Comittee

[LiamQ]

The W3C is a consortium that includes the makers of IE, Netscape, Opera, and Safari. Check their About page and the member list.

(I know, I've been trolled, but some might find the clarification useful.)

Valid (x)HTML

[woogieoogieboogie]

All that should be a concern is using valid HTML. Nothing more should be needed to assist anyone. It should be up to the user and their user agent to render the delivered HTML appropriately. No developer should ever be required to compensate for any persons disability. The developers responsibility is to deliver valid HTML to the user.

Not to mention how absurd it is to assume that developers know about or understand the special needs of people. We are devlopers, not therapists or doctors.

The W3C should also consider the cost of bandwidth. By fully compling with their recs, each html page will increase in size from 25 to 50%. No problem when you are delivering a few thousand pages a month, but when you are delivering tens of millions of pages, that additional bloat translates into a lot of extra money on bandwidth.

Re:Valid (x)HTML

[nicky_d]

All that should be a concern is using valid HTML

That's certainly an excellent start (though valid XHTML would be far preferable), but not by any means a full solution. If I post an image that contains relevant information (a graph, say), all I need to provide is a simple ALT tag ("Usage graph for 2002"), and a HTML validator will let it pass. But that tag is of no use to someone who can't see it, but needs the information in conveys. That's why we need more comprehensive standards to ensure that, as the first WCAG checkpoint says, content is perceivable by any user.

It can be hard work. I'm still trying to get the commercial designers of our main site to apply standard formatting to all links, instead of underlining some and not others, and having different mouseover behaviours on the same page (and in the same paragraph...). Again, their HTML is most likely valid, but the resulting page is not accessible.

For my part, I do follow your advice - I aim for valid XHTML, and believe that it will result in an accessible and usable page. I think it works, but it's not automatic - you still have to think about the information you're presenting and how best to present it - there's an infinite number of ways to present your information in valid XHTML, but some will be (far) more accessible than others.

Re:Valid (x)HTML

[Anonymous Coward]

The developers responsibility is to deliver valid HTML to the user.

Indeed, in your case it's evidently asking too much to expect valid English nevermind anything else. You might want to read up on standards relating to apostrophes.

Re:Valid (x)HTML

[JimDabell]

Not to mention how absurd it is to assume that developers know about or understand the special needs of people. We are devlopers, not therapists or doctors.

What do you think the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are for?

The W3C should also consider the cost of bandwidth. By fully compling with their recs, each html page will increase in size from 25 to 50%.

Please back that up. The trend is towards less bandwidth usage, not more. Take a look at the recent redesigns by many high-profile sites - they are all reporting a major decrease in bandwidth usage.

Re:Valid (x)HTML

[Anonymous Coward]

...and just like every grammer/speling flame, you've made a mistake yourself :)

Never mind.

Nevermind.

One is proper English. One is the name of an album.

Re:Valid (x)HTML

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

All that should be a concern is using valid HTML. Nothing more should be needed to assist anyone. It should be up to the user and their user agent to render the delivered HTML appropriately.

Nope! Its a good idea to using valid markup, since rendering is more predictable but it isn't the most important thing, and it certainly doesn't, on its own, do all that much for accessibility.

You *do* need to create markup that gives meaning to the content... so the main heading in a page should be a H1 for example. This allows the users web client to interpret the structure of a page and deliver that content in a form that the user can deal with.

No developer should ever be required to compensate for any persons disability. The developers responsibility is to deliver valid HTML to the user.

Oooh a tad blunt! You don't work in politics do ya?! I think I understand where you're at - and you're correct that it isn't your job to sort out everyones disability. BUT, it is your job to communicate a message and to facilitate this, it is a good idea to try and markup your site in a way that makes it possible for people of all abilities to navigate and understand your site.

Not to mention how absurd it is to assume that developers know about or understand the special needs of people. We are devlopers, not therapists or doctors.

True. But thats what the W3C guidelines are for - so you don't have to understand. Just read the docs and try to broadly understand to goal (structure and semantic meaning) rather than thinking about specific disabilities (although role-play might help you understand).

Overall though, I'd say don't get too stressed about it. Read the guidelines, and try to make your site accessible as best you can!

Re:Valid (x)HTML

[woogieoogieboogie]

Please back that up. The trend is towards less bandwidth usage, not more. Take a look at the recent redesigns by many high-profile sites - they are all reporting a major decrease in bandwidth usage.

The trend from overbloated sites utilizing html 3.2 markup. A clean valid xhtml page will increase in size tremendously when all the form labels, table headers and other addition "descriptive" elements are added. Look for yourself. Write an web form with XHTML and CSS, and then add in all the factors needed to make it pass priority 3 and you will have at least a 25% increase in file size. Teh CSS will also bloat because you are not supposed to rely on the "cascade" of CSS, you must explicitely specify background and foreground clors as well as give a textual description of presentational styles. Eliminating javascript forces uneeded round trips to the server for calculatiosn which should be performed on the client.

Re:Valid (x)HTML

[CaptKilljoy]

No developer should ever be required to compensate for any persons disability. The developers responsibility is to deliver valid HTML to the user.

This view is, pardon the pun, rather shortsighted. When you're 70 or 80 and your sight starts giving out, do you plan on giving up using the web? Didn't think so.

As more and more web-saavy people enter old age, any business with a web page that isn't accessible is going to receive a rude awakening.

Re:Valid (x)HTML

[woogieoogieboogie]

This view is, pardon the pun, rather shortsighted. When you're 70 or 80 and your sight starts giving out, do you plan on giving up using the web? Didn't think so. As more and more web-saavy people enter old age, any business with a web page that isn't accessible is going to receive a rude awakening.

What the user does with the HTML is up to them. The job is to write valid markup. It is the users responsibility to provide themselves with the appropriate user agent to render the markup according to their needs.

Re:Another Useless doc from a Useless Comittee

[Anonymous Coward]

Its post like the one this is in reply to that make me actually want to sign up to slash dot... so I can mod them up.

The original post "Another Useless doc from a Useless Comittee" is the big load of non-sense I have seen in a while... yet it is visible for all to see, while the my parent post sits as a mere hyperlink... I wish I could mod it up.

Echoing the parent... no the W3C is not the people who make IE, nor is it the people who make Mozilla, it is series of commities comprised of people from ALL the major browser manufactures... plus a hell of alot of other people.

Every professional web developer, or web services provider I know uses w3c recommendations as their bible... just cause some hack thinks he knows better doesn't mean the w3c is invalid.

Bandwidth and W3C Recommendations

[LiamQ]

The W3C should also consider the cost of bandwidth. By fully compling with their recs, each html page will increase in size from 25 to 50%.

On what do you base this claim? In my experience, most pages that attempt to comply with W3C Recommendations use less bandwidth than the non-compliant tag soup that dominates the Web. Tag soup pages generally include useless images and bloated markup (<font>, unnecessary tables) that standards-based pages don't have.

Re:Bandwidth and W3C Recommendations

[woogieoogieboogie]

Based upon using table summaries, lables for form fields etc.... The WAI guidelines are very extensiveas are section 508's. The extra infornmation required to assist TTS and other alternative technologies creates extensive bloat.

dull and duller

[sentientbeing]

aw man that is one of the dullest articles ive ever read. And judging by the number of comments to this thread im not the only one.
The first 10 pages of the article are a desciption about the article. it reminds me of them self absorbed bloggers whos content pages are filled to the brim on their website about what changes theyve made to their website.

Re:Another Useless doc from a Useless Comittee

[SoSueMe]

Has anyone else noticed that the "quality" of troll posts is declining?

Where is the creativity, the insight wrapped in incendiary comments, the art?

I love reading a well crafted troll post that degenerates into an all out flame war.

This post is a sad attempt by someone who has no talent.

Compulsory vs Voluntary, Public vs Private...

[crashnbur]

I've been hearing about accessibility and other potentially imposing guidelines for quite some time, and I've always been curious: is there any plan to try to enforce the guidelines? Or are they intended to be recommended standards to be followed throughout a more libertarian kind of world wide web?

The reason I ask is that I can certainly understand why official government and commercial web sites might need to be held to rather strict standards -- the freedom of speech does not apply to them nearly to the extent that it does to the private individual. But speaking of the private individual, should you and I also be subject to enforcement of web guidelines even in our personal, private web space?

Re:Compulsory vs Voluntary, Public vs Private...

[JimDabell]

I've been hearing about accessibility and other potentially imposing guidelines for quite some time, and I've always been curious: is there any plan to try to enforce the guidelines?

There are many countries in which accessibility is a legal requirement for lots of organisations. For more information on these, please see WAI Policy.

But speaking of the private individual, should you and I also be subject to enforcement of web guidelines even in our personal, private web space?

I believe the most common point of view is that people who must cater to the needs of disabled people in the physical world must also do so on the WWW.

For instance, McDonald's are legally obliged to provide bathrooms that are specially equipped for people with mobility problems, at least in the UK. However private homes aren't required to provide them. It seems reasonable to draw the line at the same place on the web - so individuals would not be required to follow WCAG (or similar), yet service providers would.

Re:Compulsory vs Voluntary, Public vs Private...

[mrd_yaddayadda]

For instance, McDonald's are legally obliged to provide bathrooms that are specially equipped for people with mobility problems, at least in the UK. However private homes aren't required to provide them. It seems reasonable to draw the line at the same place on the web - so individuals would not be required to follow WCAG (or similar), yet service providers would.

So... what kind of companies? All companies? Or just companies above a certain size? And if all companies, you realise that screws small operations into the ground interms of their web presence costs. And if just above a certain size, what size? How do you determine it? And as soon as you've come up with an arbitrarily defined point where it has to be done, what have you done but put a big pile of eeny meeny miny mo rules that mean nothing except that someone felt they should be in place.

Legislation should not be arbitrary.

Re:Compulsory vs Voluntary, Public vs Private...

[JimDabell]

So... what kind of companies? All companies? Or just companies above a certain size?

In terms of the UK, feel free to read up on the law yourself. Or did you mean what should be the case? All the accessibility related laws I've heard about have some provision that it should be "reasonable" to provide services in an accessible manner.

And if all companies, you realise that screws small operations into the ground interms of their web presence costs.

Are you kidding? HTML is accessible by default. You have to actively screw up a document to make it inaccessible. The idea that accessible websites cost more to produce is an unfounded myth.

And if just above a certain size, what size? [...] Legislation should not be arbitrary.

Do you realise that the same argument would also apply to speed limits? Do you think the argument is valid?

Re:Compulsory vs Voluntary, Public vs Private...

[Maul]

I don't think this should be ENFORCED legally by anyone. That is just silly.

A site that presents visual content (art, comics, or whatever) can not be made "accessible," since the point of the page, looking at the visual content, is lost to those who can't see. Many of these sites could be considered "commercial," depending on where you draw the line. However, the last thing a page that presents visual contet needs is the government forcing them to waste time and money to make their page accessible to the blind.

These standards are good, but they should not be enforced by law.

Re:Compulsory vs Voluntary, Public vs Private...

[Tsu Dho Nimh]

"is there any plan to try to enforce the guidelines"

Any site by an organization or company that serves the general public should comply. It's a no-brainer ... why would you deliberately create websites that only some of the visitors can use? How many potential customers do you want to turn away at the door, after spending a lot of effort to get them to the site with search engines and ads ... it might work for a trendy nightclub, but it's a suicidal tactic for a web-based business.

I'f Timmy's Terrific Toe Jam Sculpture site doesn't want to comply, that's Timmy's right. However, Timmy will probably not get much traffic.

Re:Compulsory vs Voluntary, Public vs Private...

[Isofarro]

I don't think this should be ENFORCED legally by anyone. That is just silly.

What is silly is that web designers can't produce quality and valid work, and so people have resorted to legal enforcement to get them to do so. People are merely protecting their rights to participate in society.

I think it is good.

[SphynxSR]

I do think having this standard is a good idea. But once this standard is in place, I see these interests groups going around and sueing everyone they can get their hands on. (Damn I'm paranoid)

Re:I think it is good.

[JimDabell]

But once this standard is in place, I see these interests groups going around and sueing everyone they can get their hands on.

This is already happening.

• The RNIB is acting on behalf of people in the UK
• SOCOG was fined 20,000AUD in Australia for failing to provide an accessible website.
• MARTA lost a lawsuit under the ADA.
• AOL, Claire's, Bank of America and Wells Fargo have all settled when sued over the accessibility of their websites.

Re:Free 31 MB Aria Giovanni Porn Movie

[Anonymous Coward]

Vladinator is a pigfucker; he likes to fuck pigs.

Sheesh

[Anonymous Coward]

>Once the WCAG 2.0 becomes a recognized standard (probably sometime in 2004), it will most likely be a concern for web developers

Why do you say that?

The HTML standard has been out for years, and it isn't a concern for the average web developer. Why should they start being concerned about accessibility guidelines, when right now they write pages that can only be viewed in Internet Explorer, or only after installing some sort of trojan/spyware on your machine?

Remember when you could type in an address and not see 'Directory Listing Denied'?

disconnect triggers from events

[crovira]

is practice as well as in design. Then its becomes a lot easier to farm out presentation and trigger interaction to switchable leaves on the presentation layer (like switching data base engines leavel on the persistence layer.)

It may be infrastructure and belongs "behind the GypRock" but yhou still have to deal with it in a coherent fashion.

Re:Oh goody

[slashfucker]

The browser is another story. But Microsoft has had one of the industry's most forward approaches with respect to handicap accessibility since day 1.

I'll give a recent example; in Windows XP, press Windows Key-U. Here we find Narrator, Magnifier, and On Screen Keyboard. Narrator is a very simple screen reader that is able to read dialogs and other alerts aloud. Magnifier is self-descriptive. On-screen keyboard has a fair amount of configurability. If you go to Settings>Typing Mode, it can actually be configured in a "scan and pick" mode much like the input method used by Stephen Hawking, so that a person with limited mobility can type using a single joystick button press, or any sort of "sip and puff" device connected to the gameport.

These are just a few new features, in addition to the obvious ones listed in the Control Panel under Accessibility, and the general configurability of interface which allows people to customize in whatever way is necessary for their disability (change colors for Red-Green color perception issues, link sounds to events, etc)

As far as the whole Standard-Compliance "Endian" battle goes, I would submit that if one looks further than IE 4 (which is only 5 years old, for chrissake) one would find that this is no longer an issue, but for anal-retentive knit-pickers. IE6 has a standards-compliant CSS2 rendering engine, which can be toggled by the HTML author by use of the DOCTYPE directive, as opposed to Nutscrape 6 which completely destroyed rendering of most web-pages by not remaining backwards-compatible.

I would further submit that at present in the "browser market", there is NO single product which "has it all" (If you mention Opera, I have 3 letters for you - DOM). Everyone has a distinct subset of "feature nirvana", and the idea that Microsoft is culpably negligent for failing to hit the moving target of "Full W3C compliance" when nobody else can is just plain old flame-throwing.

[EX]-Laxism in webpage building programs

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why the OSS community comes up with it's own "Dreamweaver" or "Frontpage". It's either that, or apply pressure to these companies to comply with the standards, and we all know how effective that is. To simply give up, is like Linux giving up because Microsoft has 90-95% of the market. Do you really want proprietary companies controlling "The Web"? The "freedom" highway will have tollbooths.

I don't think he's really British

[Anonymous Coward]

He said:
"Dirty GNU/Linux Hacker Tired of Faggot Sex "

That certainly rules out being British, as Brits never get tired of faggot sex. I think the use of the word "mum" was some kind of smoke screen. From whom, I don't have a clue.

Rebuttal to those Accessability Nitwits

[Anonymous Coward]

Somewhere around REBUTTAL #7 .....It's millions of times cheaper and faster to have a single programmer update a popular screen reader or non-visual browser to look for that ID attribute in the tag instead of having millions of web designers in the entire world do a complete redesign the entire web site.....

http://www.decloak.com/Products/Dreamweaver/Nested Templates/TablesOrLayers.aspx

Walk a mile in my shoes.

[Anonymous Coward]

I noticed that this got moderated as Flamebait. Yea wishing an affliction upon someone is mean, but the really sad fact is that human beings even need such things to happen to them before they understand the sometimes "raw deal" that life dishes out. You know that whole "walk a mile in my shoes" thing. As a blind person "yea me", I understand what it means to navigate a world that's sight-centric. I deal with it (not really much of an alternative), but it would be nice for others out there to understand that there is a portion of the world out there that isn't as blessed as they are (and NO we don't want your pity). We aren't asking people to sacrifice their newborn child. We aren't asking people to kill kittens. We're mearly asking that people take reasonable steps to make a world that we all can inhabit. Is that too much to ask?

Here's something insightful -

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck the W3C.

Every damned meta-version, they decide to obsolete a few dozen heavily-used tags, replacing them with new tags that do precisely the same thing.

Their documentation is horribly written. It's a twisted morass of insanity.

And, of course, they have no power. So, why, pray tell, should we listen to them?

"OH I R TEH COOL D00d! I R TEH STANDARD INSTEAD OF MAKIG WEBSITE GOOD IN BROWSER!"

Yeah, thanks, but no thanks. I'll continue writing pages that look good in as many browsers as possible, and damned be the W3C.

Re:Here's something insightful -

[JimDabell]

Every damned meta-version, they decide to obsolete a few dozen heavily-used tags, replacing them with new tags that do precisely the same thing.

Care to give an example?

Their documentation is horribly written. It's a twisted morass of insanity.

Agreed.

And, of course, they have no power. So, why, pray tell, should we listen to them?

For interoperability purposes.

Yeah, thanks, but no thanks. I'll continue writing pages that look good in as many browsers as possible, and damned be the W3C.

Looking good and complying with W3C recommendations are not mutually exclusive.

Sites screwing with browsers.

[moncyb]

Switching window focus without letting the user know that it is going to happen can confuse accessibility programs and users.

It's even worse than that. Some sites have Flash or Java, which pops up a plugin warning dialog in Mozilla (I don't want either installed), and the page will change focus back to the main window. I have to find the dialog again (either with alt-tab or moving the window, because the browser window will be on top), and click the stupid If I leave too many of these dialogs open, Mozilla will crash. Yeah, this is caused by bugs in Mozilla, but when you have so many "features" (mostly unwanted by users) on your site, you are bound to start triggering bugs. Especially considering the two most popular browsers (I consider N$ and Mozilla as one) are bug filled bloatware.

I would be using Lynx, but these days too many sites are unfriendly to text based browsers. I wonder if Opera is ready for FreeBSD yet...

How about no WCAG?

[Frobozz0]

--sarcasm--
I vote for not letting anyone on the web that doesn't have a P4 Win XP box with IE 6 or greater, in English, with perfect vision, no physical hindrances, and impeccable hygenie.
-- end sarcasm --

What a pain in the ass this is going to be to implement. This must be what engineers complained about when the Persons with Disabilities act passed. I'm all for it, but the logistics can make it unbelievably resource intensive. Is it bad to not want to help unless it directly effects you? :-) Yes? Damn! :-)

Re:Another Useless doc from a Useless Comittee

[Anonymous Coward]

I might be wrong

That's the only part you did get right.

Possible solution to Accessibility Lunacy

[Anonymous Coward]

.....It's millions of times cheaper and faster to have a single programmer update a popular screen reader or non-visual browser to look for that ID attribute in the tag instead of having millions of web designers in the entire world do a complete redesign the entire web site.....

http://www.decloak.com/Products/Dreamweaver/Nested Templates/TablesOrLayers.aspx

Re:Possible solution to Accessibility Lunacy

[JimDabell]

It's millions of times cheaper and faster to have a single programmer update a popular screen reader or non-visual browser to look for that ID attribute in the tag instead of having millions of web designers in the entire world do a complete redesign the entire web site

"Looking for an id attribute in the tag" isn't any kind of solution. There just isn't anything sensible user-agents can do when faced with stupid markup, and even if there was, we'd end up with a completely screwed up language at the end of it. Consider this:

<img src="foo.png">

Now, without an alt attribute, what use is this to a user-agent that does not render images? What is the sensible thing to do here?

http://www.decloak.com/Products/Dreamweaver/Nested Templates/TablesOrLayers.aspx

If that is what you are using as source material, no wonder you have the wrong idea. I've never seen so many blatant misrepresentations of the truth and other peoples arguments in one document before.

Re:Another Useless doc from a Useless Comittee

[Anonymous Coward]

You are wrong. Tim Berners-Lee invented HTTP in 1989, and wrote the first web server and web browser in 1990.

The W3C was formed in 1994.

Next time you think you might be wrong, do some research. You might learn something.

A chart of stock prices

[yerricde]

How would it be possible to make a line plot of a stock price over time accessible to those who cannot view images? It would be possible to provide the stock price as a table, but spotting trends from a table of textual data read aloud is not especially feasible for the user. Spotting the significant trends on the server is potentially an AI-complete problem.

Benefit of structural markup

[yerricde]

I think you're making a cognitive claim, even there (about the cognitive relationship between structures and styles).

Structural markup involves making content and structure once and then making the presentation for each medium. In fact, the technology lets the designer reuse presentation information across documents. Authoring with presentational markup, on the other hand, would require redoing each document's structure for each medium; compared to structural markup, I find it a gross waste of effort.

If someone authoring HTML by hand wants to skip some whitespace, multiple Ps (or BRs) is an entirely natural and reasonable way to do it.

An even better way: find out why, structurally, the designer wants to add whitespace between elements, and then just put a margin-top: 3em instruction in the style of whatever structural element needs whitespace before it. Then, in the aural stylesheet, set it off with something like margin-top: 3sec (not real code). And if the designer needs to change how much whitespace a particular structure gets, he can change it in one place and have the change show up for all instances of that structure.

Logical jumps in CSS

[yerricde]

you notice that the single space between two paragraphs is too narrow-- you want to widen it to express a logical jump, or a chronological one.

How does this look? Here's the HTML:

<p class="logicaljump">...</p>

and the CSS:

p.logicaljump { margin-top: 3em }

Then, whenever the author needs space for a logical jump before a paragraph, he can call on this class, and the site's accessibility technician can add, for example, an analogous audio gap to the same class's entry in the site's aural stylesheet.

Does RSS lack ads and bandwidth control?

[yerricde]

Its called RSS. Its a way of syndicating new items on a website.

I understand the basic principles behind RSS (Rich Site Summary), but in practice, advertising-sponsored sources find it harder to include a message from one's sponsor in highly structured content such as RSS than in semi-structured content such as HTML. RSS sources also eventually notice the problem of aggregators running an "update cycle" too often and running up the source's bandwidth bill. What are some practical solutions to these apparent problems?

Yet

[yerricde]

s508 compliance it's only required if you're a federal government agency or contractor

Yet. In the United States at least, these non-discrimination requirements have a way of trickling down from government agencies to contractors to suppliers to any organization with more than n employees and involved in interstate commerce. In addition, it's hard for a business to justify not becoming a government contractor if a government considers making a deal with the business for some high volume of goods and services.

More than one document and more than one medium

[yerricde]

Why should I have to replace my font tags and tables, that have worked absolutely well for *years*, with some new fangled technology that does the same thing?

It's less effort for you, the designer. If you change a style in CSS, it shows up across all pages that use that style. Font tags can't do that unless you're generating them server-side, such as with XSLT. CSS and structural markup also let you quickly specify styles for more than one medium.

*Why* can't blind reading software handle tables, hmm?

It can handle tables, but what makes sense visually often doesn't make sense aurally. They're different mediums, and in different mediums, content should be presented differently.

Do such tools exist? Web designers aren't coders.

[yerricde]

If the web designer is creating the site using tools that produce inaccessible markup, why is the designer using a broken tool.

Because no suitable, mature tool exists, and web designers typically aren't GUI application programmers.

Don't blame the tool, blame the web designer - he should know better.

Blame the web designer for not spending years learning a whole new environment and set of paradigms (GUI programming instead of web development)?

Re:Another Useless doc from a Useless Comittee

[yerricde]

Tim Berners-Lee invented HTTP in 1989 ... The W3C was formed in 1994.

Yet Tim BL is a prominent figure in W3C activity. Therefore, an organization for whom "the people that invented the web" work for set this standard. Your point?