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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!"
How about a recommendation to get rid of popups/unders?
sounds good to me...
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
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...
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!
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.
If you don't like having choices made for you, you should start making your own. - Neal Stephenson
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.
All visitors do if the search engine they use pays more attention to emphasized text.
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?