On Tue, 12 Feb 2002, Kylie Baxter wrote:
> The site does look rubbish in NN4, but that's a deliberate choice as part
> of the campaign to make users upgrade their browsers, isn't it?
> [http://archive.webstandards.org/upgrade/] Whether you agree or not, it's
> an interesting idea...
Gnash! I know you weren't asking for a rant, but...
I went to look at a site the other day from my home machine and because of
the way the welcome page was set up I couldn't access it at all.
Admittedly I have a 486 intended for wordprocessing, but I also use it for
email and have a non-javascript version of Opera (5 or 6) on it too -
perfectly acceptable speed with a fast modem. And naming no names, but it
was a UK HE site - no alt tags on any of the images on the welcome page,
all the links were javascript only, I couldn't get to anything on the site
except the press releases!
I don't want to pay for a whizzy machine at home when I spend all day on a
computer at work anyway... but accessibility does mean more than making
things available to people using screen readers (tho' this site wouldn't
have passed those criteria either). What about all those people that are
getting free reconditioned computers under the government's scheme?
They're not likely to be high-quality machines with fast processors. I got
mine from the local computer recycling scheme. When you get down into the
'business case' issues around accessibility it's these kind of benefits
that come up. I'm just saying that not everyone has a choice, and this
kind of thing is like a 'noframes' message saying 'go away and update your
browser' - very unhelpful. What is the point of HEs having 'widening
participation' offices if the rest of the institution isn't thinking about
issues like this?
Rant over ;-)
Kriss
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