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Posted by Monte Gardner on December 13, 2004, 1:25 pm
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I'm teaching a class on web authoring and html. I'm trying to find a
good reading article on accesibility issues. I'm trying to keep the
reading supplements to relatively light reading, so I don't want to
just point my students to the W3C's Web Accessibilty Guidline articles
(a little to heavy reading). Can any of you suggest an online article
out there that will explain why you need to think about accesbility and
some basic ideas on how to achieve it?
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Posted by Dan on December 13, 2004, 3:18 pm
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I discuss some related issues in my Web Tips site:
http://webtips.dan.info/
--
Dan
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Posted by Alan J. Flavell on December 13, 2004, 11:56 pm
Please log in for more thread options On Mon, 13 Dec 2004, Monte Gardner wrote:
> I'm teaching a class on web authoring and html. I'm trying to find a
> good reading article on accesibility issues. I'm trying to keep the
> reading supplements to relatively light reading,
Oh dear. You ask what appears to be a plausible enough question, but
there's no simple answer. Well, I'd say there -is- a simple answer -
when you know that it is, and are receptive to it. But most of the
folks learning HTML will come to it with a ballast of preconceptions
that prevent them being receptive to it. Un-learning preconceptions
is, by experience, /far/ harder than learning completely new stuff.
There are quite a few contributors here whom you could learn from, but
you'd need to follow the discussions rather than popping up and asking
an apparently simple question...
As for my own inept contributions, I was tidying-up some files last
night and stumbled across a half-year-old half-written critique of a
course guide that I found for a supposedly "advanced" course in web
page design.[1]
There's a posting based on it, archived by goo-gropes at
http://groups.google.co.uk/groups?selm=Pine.LNX.4.53.0406041947120.5642%40ppepc56.ph.gla.ac.uk
- which might be helpful at least as a positioning move.
[1] In the academic world it's often noted that books with "advanced"
in the title are at best aimed at secondary school level, whereas ones
with "elementary" in the title probably need a university degree,
maybe even a PhD, to even be able to understand them, let alone to
learn anything from them.
> so I don't want to
> just point my students to the W3C's Web Accessibilty Guidline articles
That's entirely understandable. There's a tendency for them to get
bound up in the minutiae of their interests, and lose sight of the big
picture.
> out there that will explain why you need to think about accesbility
> and some basic ideas on how to achieve it?
My "basic" idea is to go right back to the concept of logical
structure (even allowing for the fact that HTML is less than ideal
in that regard - but it's the best thing that we have access to, in
practical terms, so we use it, "warts and all").
The real WWW out there -will- decouple presentation from structure, no
matter whether you're in favour of it or not, and no matter those
precious designers who insist that their art is worthless if they
cannot impose both, in exactly the terms that they have conceived.
So learn what this decoupling involves - capitalise on it, exploit it,
make best use of the strengths of the medium to communicate the
content to the widest range of users and browsing situations. Don't -
as those pixel-precious graphic designers insist on doing - put
yourself at the mercy of its weaknesses.
good luck
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Posted by Tim on December 14, 2004, 12:18 pm
Please log in for more thread options On Mon, 13 Dec 2004, Monte Gardner wrote:
>> I'm teaching a class on web authoring and html. I'm trying to find a
>> good reading article on accesibility issues. I'm trying to keep the
>> reading supplements to relatively light reading,
> [1] In the academic world it's often noted that books with "advanced"
> in the title are at best aimed at secondary school level, whereas ones
> with "elementary" in the title probably need a university degree,
> maybe even a PhD, to even be able to understand them, let alone to
> learn anything from them.
This has tickled my curiosity, I've heard comments like that a few times.
Is there some sensible reason for it, or is it some "in" joke?
>> out there that will explain why you need to think about accesbility
>> and some basic ideas on how to achieve it?
> My "basic" idea is to go right back to the concept of logical
> structure (even allowing for the fact that HTML is less than ideal
> in that regard - but it's the best thing that we have access to, in
> practical terms, so we use it, "warts and all").
As well as the technical aspects (simpler pages working more reliably in
more browsers, sometimes because of the many quite crap user agents that'd
do better with simpler page, not to mention people using fancy things in
really stupid ways), don't forget the human angle:
There's an *INCREDIBLY* large number of people in the world with some form
of disability or special needs, and when done *properly* HTML is one of the
few technologies that can *easily* accomodate them, and everybody else.
That's a big reason "why" you need to think about it.
--
If you insist on e-mailing me, use the reply-to address (it's real but
temporary). But please reply to the group, like you're supposed to.
This message was sent without a virus, please delete some files yourself.
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Posted by Stan Brown on December 14, 2004, 1:53 am
Please log in for more thread options "Tim" wrote in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html:
>There's an *INCREDIBLY* large number of people in the world with some form
>of disability or special needs, and when done *properly* HTML is one of the
>few technologies that can *easily* accomodate them, and everybody else.
>That's a big reason "why" you need to think about it.
Yes, absolutely.
I had a student who was legally blind (he wore very thick glasses and
could read large print very close to his nose). The law and common
decency say that a public institution like my college should give him
reasonable accommodation. I didn't have to change any of the class
Web site for him; he just viewed the pages in his browser with his
chosen text size (which I'm sure was enormous).
That kind of stuff is actually easier to do IMHO that if one tries to
specify exact layout and sizes and then accommodate after the fact
for people who can't read it.
--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2.1 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
Why We Won't Help You:
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/05/05/why_we_wont_help_you
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