how many users are likely to be technically minded enough to write their own games ?
Quite a fair chunk of games players have their games ideas. It just takes someone who knows how to code. Look at the number of Open Source games based on rewriting and improving a classic game -- like Elite.
Ballmers reason for the pull-out threat was that they need to sell games to get a profit from the XBox. What happens when people don't buy the games, or enough games to break that even? Do Microsoft then impose their will and threaten to withdraw the console unless the governments do their utmost to meet country targets in game sales?
On a twisted note, is it actually possible to write Open Source GPL licensed games for the XBox - wouldn't that be a laugh when the majority of game acquisitions for the XBox are open source with no Microsoft tax?
I'm surprised at how many people are complaining about having to make their web sites accessible. Why is this such a big deal?
Web designers have great difficulty in taking responsibility for anything - that's why they are web designers and not artists or authors. They've spent years pretending they have a profession.
Now that people are expecting a professional service (how dare they!), web designers are compelled to avoid doing the right thing as much as possible. So they need to pretend its incredibly difficult, incredibly expensive, doesn't apply, leads to bloat, the browsers can do all the work.
Its about the unwillingness to take responsibility.
so instead make a smarter screen reader that can figure this stuff out.
The point of a simple markup language like HTML is so that its easily computer readable. Bloating markup with markup that doesn't describe the structure of the document merely obfusticates the value of the content, and the result is unusable to many.
The solution is not to bloat browsers up with more error correction routines to fix the problems you can't be bothered to fix. The solution is to make browsers conform to an existing recommendation, and encourage content authors to take responsibility for their content.
That's why the W3 has _both_ Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (not to mention Authoring Tools Accessibility Guidelines). Everyone has their bit to do, their area of responsible. It is time to take responsibility for the websites you deliver.
The web is not a US controlled and distributed medium. When you create a website, you're not publishing and distributing it specifically for the US.
Irrelevant really. This push toward accessibility isn't limited to the US. Most European countries are moving in the same direction, so to is New Zealand, all chasing the pace set by Australia.
In addition, the government hasn't made these kinds of regulations for all other types of media, why do it for the internet?
Because the World Wide Web isn't limited in rigid ways like the print industry. A correctly authored html document is just as accessible visually as aurally - you cannot say the same about a printed book.
Pg 332 of the book is a section titled "US Department of Justice Policy Ruling: Applying the ADA to the Internet" which adequately paints the picture that ADA encompasses businesses providing "Public Accommodations", which are businesses offering a public service or public goods that have websites.
Section 255 is the section found in the Telecommunications Act, which covers businesses doing business with governmental agencies.
Section 508 is of the Rehabilitation Act Amendments of 1998.
I think the submitter is a little mistaken; as far as I know, only government sites MUST be compliant with the ADA
Well, there's one good reason to read the book, try page 192. The part that's titled "ADA and the Internet" -- this covers websites offering a service to the public, including non-governmental websites run by businesses. If you sell a product or service to the public, then your website falls into the scope of ADA.
Section 508 is actually from the Telecommunications Act, not ADA.
I've been reading the book off and on over the last two months. There's a lot of useful material in the book that guidelines don't cover, like legal precedents and tackling some of the myths raised against accessibility. Its practical in some aspects too and complements, not replaces, guidlines such as WCAG and RNIB.
I also can't afford to hire a blind guy at my work
The RNIB accessibility package apparently has a blindfold as one of its contents. Just load up a speech browser, switch off the monitors, put on the blindfold and talk back to your browser.
I'd hope it would move more towards getting the site made properly accessible (and hopefully prompts others to do so as well),
I'm hoping for the latter. Its time to treat inaccessible like the social disease that it is. Any story that makes headlines toward creating accessible websites is good, even if it fills lawyers pockets.
than awarding the plaintiff with a huge wad of cash
From quite a number of comments above, ADA does not advocate punitive costs, just demanding accessiblity compliance. A pity though - a nice multi-million punitive cost will go a lot further to convincing businesses to create accessible websites, since money is the only thing they seem to understand.
consider the fact that the web is a visual medium which is obviously not very condusive to your disability.
Fact? Please provide a serious reference of this fact, or conceed that this is merely your delusion. The Web is a digital medium that's textual in nature. This combination makes the web accessible in both visual and aural mediums, and has no limitations on the other four senses either.
It would be like cutting out the images in a movie but wearing headphones describing what you are supposed to see.
It would be like having a text-only copy of George Bush's speeches - at least that way there's actually a chance of finding something that makes sense.
Negligence or ignorance does not indicate attempt. It generally indicates lack of attempt.
Fine. So if its a lack of attempt, then that would be much more damning that "lack of _reasonable_ attempt" at making a website accessible, which is all the plaintiffs need to prove.
If Flash is needed to draw attention to something on a website, then it indicates a severe usability problem already. People don't just walk past websites, so they don't need to have their eyes caught by something. People come to a site from a link, sometimes from a search engine, sometimes from a link from an email - either way, they know what they are looking for. So instead of wasting time on getting something else noticed, you'd be far better off giving the visitor exactly what they initially wanted.
Which do you notice more, a static billboard or one that moves in some way
I notice the real content on the page, since I have Flash and Javascript disabled. Once web designers realise why people visit websites and they give up this ludicrous belief that they know more about the visitor and his requirements than the visitor himself, then just maybe there'll be a use for Flash.
What's the point of accessible Flash if all you are going to do with it is piss off visitors?
The smart thing would be to have an HTML and flash version.
If doubling the cost of creating a website is your idea of "smart".
Here is your fucking clue. There is no RULE which says HTML documents are required to be presentation independant. In fact, it was the beloved W3C which introduced the abortion called HTML 3.2 which made HTML a presentational markup language.
HTML 3.2 was an abortion - why? Because it was an attempt to reconcile the browser war between Netscape and Microsoft by including their proprietory elements into the specification. These tags were largely presentational and went against the grain of W3. The reconciliation didn't work, and in HTML4.01 when W3 regained the driving force behind HTML, they deprecated most of the presentational elements apart from <b> and <i>
It is quite clear that the W3 were quite reluctant in publishing HTML3.2, and their HTML3.0 recommendation was far superior, and included attributes for allowing external stylesheets to be used for presentation.
It is obvious that HTML3.2 was a step in the wrong direction. Thankfully facilities for stylesheets remained in HTML4.0 and onward through XHTML.
As you mention HTML3.2 was an abortion - a clear indication as any that HTML is not geared as a presentational language. Otherwise, why deprecate the vast majority of elements in the next version - undoing the damage of presentational orientated elements.
HTML documents are *supposed* to be presentation independent. If you can't understand that, you shouldn't be allowed near a web site.
So this point stands. And the quicker the drag-and-drop operators that call themselves webdesigners understand this, the quicker the web becomes a truely useful and accessible medium
This is an airline we're talking about here with a (presumably) complex online ordering system. We're talking tens, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to re-design the whole thing,
Accessibility is about the presentation of content. So the back-end system does not need to be changed, just the layer that wraps up the content into an HTML page. If you seriously need to rewrite the entire application before it can be made accessible, then that is because of incompetance.
Accessibility isn't expensive or difficult. Anyone with common sense can do it.
The latest versions of Flash have support for accessibility.
HTML has been supporting accessibility from day one, yet web designers persist in making their designs inaccessible. Why would Flash's support of accessibility* suddenly make designers more capable of accessibility when their current HTML abilities prevent them from doing so?
because there is no active attempt to disallow entry to the site.
Invalid html
Images with no alternative text
Tagsoup tables with no clear layout
Form items without proper labels
Javascript mandatory
These all strike me as "active attempts to disallow entry" - the only question is whether it is negligence or ignorance.
But, you could also spin it off the be the fault of the screen-reader.
You'd have to first prove that the device couldn't handle valid html as specified in the HTML recommendation. You'd have a much better chance suing Microsoft for their botched implementation of the CSS box model in IE5.
Can we really expect that text-based support is going to be around forever?
Considering more books are sold today than before the advent of television, the obvious answer is YES.
So what you are effectively saying is that a blind person should not be allowed the same rights as _you_ until everyone else in the US has that right first?
Does it matter?
Of course it matters, disabled people have as much right as you to participate in society. The web is a fully accessible medium - you have to do specific things to prevent that accessibility.
But let's be reasonable, unless you are a hermit, there is the ability to get a friend to read you the site. Or just call them!
So their website is inaccessible. Someone using a speech-based browser should call them instead? Ahh, where should they get the telephone number from - their website?
Geez - accessibility isn't that difficult. It is far easier to create an accessible website than it is for a blind person to find a phone number in a regular yellow-pages.
Why can't we expect competant people to create websites? Surely that is the cheaper and more effective option.
I believe some other companies have experimented with similiar systems, which they've dubbed 'call centres'.
The whole business justification for a web presence is that it reduces the cost to do business with people. From that the number of call centres needed is drastically reduced because people can do it for themselves via the website.
All Southwestern need is to produce an accessible website - not a difficult thing. Implementing a call-centre is a step backwards to the pre-WWW era, and unjustifiable from a business perspective.
The WAI and Section 508 go way overboard and create special authoring requirements which in many cases can cause extreme code bloat(titles to all links, captions to all tables,labels on form fields,long alt text etc..),
titles to links are used when your link text is insufficient to clearly indicate what you are linking to. You can avoid using the title attribute by being more expressive on your link text.
Captions to Tables: If you are using a table for no reason, then its questionable whether you need a table. A caption is just a string of text that explains what can be found in the table. A proper compliant website shouldn't have more than three or four tables anyway. And designers using tables for layout - against its purpose - are thankfully SOL. They are welcomed to join the present and quit hankering over html3.2
You don't label your form fields? That would make your forms unusable to anyone. How do they tell where to enter an address or credit card number if you don't specify what the input field needs to contain.
If you are worrying about long text on alts, then use the available longdesc attribute and put the description in a separate html file.
You considerably hyperbolise the bloat, considering that when you do the job properly the first time, and using CSS to encapsulate the presentation, the resulting file sizes, and more importantly the download time, is drastically smaller when compared to something like a slashdot frontpage.
limit your selection of technologies (flash, javascript),
So Macromedia didn't follow generally accepted standard of embedding objects into webpages. That's Macromedia's problem for not following a documented recommendation.
If your website is completely reliant on javascript, then you are asking for problems. Your website should be completely accessible without the need for javascript. Javascript should be used only to enhance an already accessible website.
HTML Validators only check that your HTML validates according to the HTML Recommendation. It does not test accessibility requirements that are not part of the HTML recommendation.
There are tools for testing the accessibility of a website. One of the best I've come across is Accessibility Valet - a much better tool than Bobby
If you comply with W3C standards, you're going to be ADA compliant (AFAIK, IANAL). Most pages are already compliant because they (more or less) follow the standards.
No, following W3 standards does not guarantee ADA compliance. It is still very possible to use valid HTML and having an end result of tag-soup. Yeah, alt attributes are mandatory as part of the html spec - that's an accessibility plus, but things like table summaries, cell identifiers and headers, skip to content links are not part of the mandatory HTML recommendation.
On the whole, you have a _much_ better chance of meeting ADA compliance with a standards compatible website. W3 compliance is only a milestone along the journey of accessible websites.
what if I write a website that shows one thing, but spits out text telling the blind person something else.
That is essentially what accessibility is - offering textual alternatives to non-textual representations. This makes the content more accessible in a larger range of situations.
Slashdot Mirror
Quite a fair chunk of games players have their games ideas. It just takes someone who knows how to code. Look at the number of Open Source games based on rewriting and improving a classic game -- like Elite.
Ballmers reason for the pull-out threat was that they need to sell games to get a profit from the XBox. What happens when people don't buy the games, or enough games to break that even? Do Microsoft then impose their will and threaten to withdraw the console unless the governments do their utmost to meet country targets in game sales?
On a twisted note, is it actually possible to write Open Source GPL licensed games for the XBox - wouldn't that be a laugh when the majority of game acquisitions for the XBox are open source with no Microsoft tax?
Web designers have great difficulty in taking responsibility for anything - that's why they are web designers and not artists or authors. They've spent years pretending they have a profession.
Now that people are expecting a professional service (how dare they!), web designers are compelled to avoid doing the right thing as much as possible. So they need to pretend its incredibly difficult, incredibly expensive, doesn't apply, leads to bloat, the browsers can do all the work.
Its about the unwillingness to take responsibility.
And thank you for an excellent post.
The point of a simple markup language like HTML is so that its easily computer readable. Bloating markup with markup that doesn't describe the structure of the document merely obfusticates the value of the content, and the result is unusable to many.
The solution is not to bloat browsers up with more error correction routines to fix the problems you can't be bothered to fix. The solution is to make browsers conform to an existing recommendation, and encourage content authors to take responsibility for their content.
That's why the W3 has _both_ Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (not to mention Authoring Tools Accessibility Guidelines). Everyone has their bit to do, their area of responsible. It is time to take responsibility for the websites you deliver.
Irrelevant really. This push toward accessibility isn't limited to the US. Most European countries are moving in the same direction, so to is New Zealand, all chasing the pace set by Australia.
Because the World Wide Web isn't limited in rigid ways like the print industry. A correctly authored html document is just as accessible visually as aurally - you cannot say the same about a printed book.
Woops. Its not my number day today.
Pg 332 of the book is a section titled "US Department of Justice Policy Ruling: Applying the ADA to the Internet" which adequately paints the picture that ADA encompasses businesses providing "Public Accommodations", which are businesses offering a public service or public goods that have websites.
Section 255 is the section found in the Telecommunications Act, which covers businesses doing business with governmental agencies.
Section 508 is of the Rehabilitation Act Amendments of 1998.
Consider what's required to read. Consider what a speech browser does. Consider that the ability to read isn't required when listening.
Well, there's one good reason to read the book, try page 192. The part that's titled "ADA and the Internet" -- this covers websites offering a service to the public, including non-governmental websites run by businesses. If you sell a product or service to the public, then your website falls into the scope of ADA.
Section 508 is actually from the Telecommunications Act, not ADA.
I've been reading the book off and on over the last two months. There's a lot of useful material in the book that guidelines don't cover, like legal precedents and tackling some of the myths raised against accessibility. Its practical in some aspects too and complements, not replaces, guidlines such as WCAG and RNIB.
The RNIB accessibility package apparently has a blindfold as one of its contents. Just load up a speech browser, switch off the monitors, put on the blindfold and talk back to your browser.
I'm hoping for the latter. Its time to treat inaccessible like the social disease that it is. Any story that makes headlines toward creating accessible websites is good, even if it fills lawyers pockets.
From quite a number of comments above, ADA does not advocate punitive costs, just demanding accessiblity compliance. A pity though - a nice multi-million punitive cost will go a lot further to convincing businesses to create accessible websites, since money is the only thing they seem to understand.
Fact? Please provide a serious reference of this fact, or conceed that this is merely your delusion. The Web is a digital medium that's textual in nature. This combination makes the web accessible in both visual and aural mediums, and has no limitations on the other four senses either.
It would be like having a text-only copy of George Bush's speeches - at least that way there's actually a chance of finding something that makes sense.
Fine. So if its a lack of attempt, then that would be much more damning that "lack of _reasonable_ attempt" at making a website accessible, which is all the plaintiffs need to prove.
If Flash is needed to draw attention to something on a website, then it indicates a severe usability problem already. People don't just walk past websites, so they don't need to have their eyes caught by something. People come to a site from a link, sometimes from a search engine, sometimes from a link from an email - either way, they know what they are looking for. So instead of wasting time on getting something else noticed, you'd be far better off giving the visitor exactly what they initially wanted.
I notice the real content on the page, since I have Flash and Javascript disabled. Once web designers realise why people visit websites and they give up this ludicrous belief that they know more about the visitor and his requirements than the visitor himself, then just maybe there'll be a use for Flash.
What's the point of accessible Flash if all you are going to do with it is piss off visitors?
If doubling the cost of creating a website is your idea of "smart".
HTML 3.2 was an abortion - why? Because it was an attempt to reconcile the browser war between Netscape and Microsoft by including their proprietory elements into the specification. These tags were largely presentational and went against the grain of W3. The reconciliation didn't work, and in HTML4.01 when W3 regained the driving force behind HTML, they deprecated most of the presentational elements apart from <b> and <i>
It is quite clear that the W3 were quite reluctant in publishing HTML3.2, and their HTML3.0 recommendation was far superior, and included attributes for allowing external stylesheets to be used for presentation.
It is obvious that HTML3.2 was a step in the wrong direction. Thankfully facilities for stylesheets remained in HTML4.0 and onward through XHTML.
As you mention HTML3.2 was an abortion - a clear indication as any that HTML is not geared as a presentational language. Otherwise, why deprecate the vast majority of elements in the next version - undoing the damage of presentational orientated elements.
So this point stands. And the quicker the drag-and-drop operators that call themselves webdesigners understand this, the quicker the web becomes a truely useful and accessible medium
Accessibility is about the presentation of content. So the back-end system does not need to be changed, just the layer that wraps up the content into an HTML page. If you seriously need to rewrite the entire application before it can be made accessible, then that is because of incompetance.
Accessibility isn't expensive or difficult. Anyone with common sense can do it.
HTML has been supporting accessibility from day one, yet web designers persist in making their designs inaccessible. Why would Flash's support of accessibility* suddenly make designers more capable of accessibility when their current HTML abilities prevent them from doing so?
(which is largely based on Microsoft's Accessibility as documented in their inaccessible website)
These all strike me as "active attempts to disallow entry" - the only question is whether it is negligence or ignorance.
You'd have to first prove that the device couldn't handle valid html as specified in the HTML recommendation. You'd have a much better chance suing Microsoft for their botched implementation of the CSS box model in IE5.
Considering more books are sold today than before the advent of television, the obvious answer is YES.
Of course it matters, disabled people have as much right as you to participate in society. The web is a fully accessible medium - you have to do specific things to prevent that accessibility.
So their website is inaccessible. Someone using a speech-based browser should call them instead? Ahh, where should they get the telephone number from - their website?
Geez - accessibility isn't that difficult. It is far easier to create an accessible website than it is for a blind person to find a phone number in a regular yellow-pages.
Why can't we expect competant people to create websites? Surely that is the cheaper and more effective option.
The whole business justification for a web presence is that it reduces the cost to do business with people. From that the number of call centres needed is drastically reduced because people can do it for themselves via the website.
All Southwestern need is to produce an accessible website - not a difficult thing. Implementing a call-centre is a step backwards to the pre-WWW era, and unjustifiable from a business perspective.
titles to links are used when your link text is insufficient to clearly indicate what you are linking to. You can avoid using the title attribute by being more expressive on your link text.
Captions to Tables: If you are using a table for no reason, then its questionable whether you need a table. A caption is just a string of text that explains what can be found in the table. A proper compliant website shouldn't have more than three or four tables anyway. And designers using tables for layout - against its purpose - are thankfully SOL. They are welcomed to join the present and quit hankering over html3.2
You don't label your form fields? That would make your forms unusable to anyone. How do they tell where to enter an address or credit card number if you don't specify what the input field needs to contain.
If you are worrying about long text on alts, then use the available longdesc attribute and put the description in a separate html file.
You considerably hyperbolise the bloat, considering that when you do the job properly the first time, and using CSS to encapsulate the presentation, the resulting file sizes, and more importantly the download time, is drastically smaller when compared to something like a slashdot frontpage.
So Macromedia didn't follow generally accepted standard of embedding objects into webpages. That's Macromedia's problem for not following a documented recommendation.
If your website is completely reliant on javascript, then you are asking for problems. Your website should be completely accessible without the need for javascript. Javascript should be used only to enhance an already accessible website.
HTML Validators only check that your HTML validates according to the HTML Recommendation. It does not test accessibility requirements that are not part of the HTML recommendation.
There are tools for testing the accessibility of a website. One of the best I've come across is Accessibility Valet - a much better tool than Bobby
No, following W3 standards does not guarantee ADA compliance. It is still very possible to use valid HTML and having an end result of tag-soup. Yeah, alt attributes are mandatory as part of the html spec - that's an accessibility plus, but things like table summaries, cell identifiers and headers, skip to content links are not part of the mandatory HTML recommendation.
On the whole, you have a _much_ better chance of meeting ADA compliance with a standards compatible website. W3 compliance is only a milestone along the journey of accessible websites.
That is essentially what accessibility is - offering textual alternatives to non-textual representations. This makes the content more accessible in a larger range of situations.