> 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?
Hi Kriss
You've raised some interesting - and complex - issues.
Within the W3C they are developing a range of new formats to provide
much needed functionality in an open and accessible way. As you know
the W3C WAI group are playing a leading role in ensuring that digital
resources are accessible (to people with disabilities, people on slow
networks, etc.) Increasingly this will require browser which support
new standards and which are not broken in some way.
A major issue is what to do for those with legacy browsers -
especially those which have bugs and do not degrade gracefully (e.g.
Netscape 4 with CSS).
To say we shouldn't go down the CSS/PNG/SMIL/SVG/ etc. route is to
deny services which are clearly needed by many.
Life was clearly easier in the past when vendors (Microsoft, Borland,
Sun or whoever) could say that version 1 of the software is no longer
supported.
So how do you see ourselves moved to a richer, more robust, more
accessible Web?
Brian
PS These are general comments and not related to the site mentioned -
which I've not looked at.
> Rant over ;-)
>
> Kriss
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> Fax: 434466
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