4 ms·

When I'm making informational web sites, I typically work very hard to achieve a seamless degradation. I wrote my comment after working on a web app I'm develop

When I'm making informational web sites, I typically work very hard to achieve a seamless degradation. I wrote my comment after working on a web app I'm developing. I sat there and tried to figure out how I could possibly make this thing accessible to a blind person and I don't think I can without creating an entirely different user interface just for them. The problem with my interface is I'm not just showing an information article that can read left-to-right top-to-bottom. It's more of a car dashboard. As more and more applications hit the web, I don't think we'll be able to just say that HTML is the web. For better or for worse (there's a whole other argument for another day) we've entered a situation with web applications where there are several players: HTML+CSS+Javascript, Flash, Silverlight, etc. Unless somebody sits down and says "Ok everybody we really need to get a grip on creating an accessibility convention for HTML+CSS+Javascript applications" you're going to have the proprietary folks pushing accessibility as an advantage of their platform. And you know what? They'll be right. Thanks for the link, I never heard of that website so I'll check it out. For what it's worth, I worked at a company that had some blind people test our sites when they were done nested tables and paid no attention to accessibility, and versions which (at least from a technical standpoint) implemented all the best practices. Frustratingly, they didn't seem to do much better. The content itself needed to be tailored to them because there was simply too much. Like you say, the web of today seems to be built for scanning large quantities of information. Just like you can't take an info-heavy website and throw it at a mobile device because people have different requirements and constraints when browsing from a mobile device, making a website accessible doesn't seem to be just an engineer problem but an editorial one too.

silencio 18y ago
Actually, Adobe and Microsoft aren't doing so shabbily on that front. http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/index.html http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/index.html http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb980136.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb980136.aspx The problem is that people don't seem to take that kind of testing into consideration unless it really matters (e.g. section 508 for .gov websites). Lastly, nested tables I don't think are THAT much of a problem. CSS can be useful in other ways - e.g. to display almost the same information in a completely different way that may benefit low vision people, or mobile users. It's some uses of ajax and the like that can be a problem, not so much a table based layout or something like that.

silencio 18y ago

Actually, Adobe and Microsoft aren't doing so shabbily on that front. http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/index.html http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/index.html http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb980136.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb980136.aspx The problem is that people don't seem to take that kind of testing into consideration unless it really matters (e.g. section 508 for .gov websites). Lastly, nested tables I don't think are THAT much of a problem. CSS can be useful in other ways - e.g. to display almost the same information in a completely different way that may benefit low vision people, or mobile users. It's some uses of ajax and the like that can be a problem, not so much a table based layout or something like that.