WAI - Your opinion - Do you design accessible sites?

I just finished reading the WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative)
Recommandation document from the W3C here:
http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WAI-WEBCONTENT-19990505/
And I must say I'm quite discouraged. I really wanted to comply with the
recommandation, but the document is so theoric, there are requirements
beyond by possibilities especially regarding special devices for impaired
people.
How can I create a Flash presentation for deaf and blind people, and for
people who navigate using a braille navigation device without either mouse
or keyboard?
I think I'll just give up. Do you follow the WAI recommendations?
Do impaired people even use these "awkward" screen readers?

--

Kerberos.

http://www.opera.com
http://www.freebsd.org
http://www.auriance.com
http://www.osresources.com
http://exodus.jabberstudio.org

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed Kerberos <me (AT) privacy (DOT) net> writing
in newspsjp9ny0bqi7syn (AT) cinza (DOT) mshome.net:

I just finished reading the WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative)
Recommandation document from the W3C here:
http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WAI-WEBCONTENT-19990505/
And I must say I'm quite discouraged. I really wanted to comply with
the recommandation, but the document is so theoric, there are
requirements beyond by possibilities especially regarding special
devices for impaired people.
How can I create a Flash presentation for deaf and blind people, and
for people who navigate using a braille navigation device without
either mouse or keyboard?
I think I'll just give up. Do you follow the WAI recommendations?
Do impaired people even use these "awkward" screen readers?

I do have have Flash enabled most of the time, unless the site I want to
visit uses it, like <http://www.joecartoon.com>.

However, when I design sites that want to use a Flash object, I do the
following:

<object ....>
<img src="static.jpg" alt="descriptive text">
</object>

That way, people who have Flash disabled, like me, still get a static
image in place, and for those without images, the alt text will be
available.

And yes, impaired people do use devices. When I visited my local Social
Security Office to get some information, the worker was blind and used a
braille device to read the computer screen. I was quite amazed at how
quickly he navigated it, and then I asked him if he used the Internet,
and he said yes, but not as much as he would like, because not that many
sites were accessible to him.

Writing markup for impaired persons is not that difficult, and has the
added benefit of being accessible by another "blind" user, Google.

--
Adrienne Boswell
Please respond to the group so others can share

Adrienne <arbpen2003 (AT) sbcglobal (DOT) net> wrote:

Writing markup for impaired persons is not that difficult, and has the
added benefit of being accessible by another "blind" user, Google.

I discovered a new kind of accessibility problem recently.

A blind computer user was trying to make airline reservations online. The
web site generated such complex pages that by the time she read enough of
it to understand what flight she wanted and how to book that flight,
tickets for that flight were no longer available at the listed price.

Wash, rinse, repeat. After the third (!) attempt to book a flight failed
because tickets were no longer available at that fare, she used the
old-fashioned toll-free number and booked tickets with a live person.

The content was more or less accessible. But the system was inaccessible
because some users could not act upon the offered choices before the
offered choices expired.
--
Darin McGrew, mcgrew (AT) stanfordalumni (DOT) org, http://www.rahul.net/mcgrew/
Web Design Group, darin (AT) htmlhelp (DOT) com, http://www.HTMLHelp.com/

"I can take one day at a time, but sometimes several days attack me at once."

Kerberos <me (AT) privacy (DOT) net> wrote:

- - the WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative)
Recommandation document - - is so theoric, there are
requirements beyond by possibilities especially regarding special
devices for impaired people.

The WAI document is partly too theoretic and partly too practical (in
the sense of being too much tied up with "current" [i.e., past]
technology details). But it's useful reading.

How can I create a Flash presentation for deaf and blind people,
and for people who navigate using a braille navigation device
without either mouse or keyboard?

Did the WAI recommendation create such problems, or does it suggest
solutions to them?

But before considering extreme cases, it's useful to consider more
common accessibility problems. After all, if you count people with less
than average eyesight _or_ less than average general intelligence, you
have about 75 % of all people. Remembering that so many Web pages use
horribly small fixed font size or grotesquely complex language or both,
we have some work to do, even if we might not have an immediate
solution that suits people like Helen Keller.

Besides, _authors_ need not do everything. You are _not_ expected to
make special arrangements for all imaginable and unimaginable forms of
impairment. Instead, you are supposed to create simple documents with
good structure, and with presentation separated from structure, so that
various assistive technologies can do their part of the job.

I think I'll just give up. Do you follow the WAI recommendations?
Do impaired people even use these "awkward" screen readers?

What awkward screen readers? They are rather advanced, you know. Partly
too advanced to "normal" people: blind people use them with such a high
speech rate that you first might not even recognize a word - but _they_
have gradually got used to fast synthetic speech.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed Darin McGrew
<mcgrew (AT) stanfordalumni (DOT) org> writing in news:cqscrl$fd2$1 (AT) blue (DOT) rahul.net:

Adrienne <arbpen2003 (AT) sbcglobal (DOT) net> wrote:
Writing markup for impaired persons is not that difficult, and has the
added benefit of being accessible by another "blind" user, Google.

I discovered a new kind of accessibility problem recently.

A blind computer user was trying to make airline reservations online. The
web site generated such complex pages that by the time she read enough of
it to understand what flight she wanted and how to book that flight,
tickets for that flight were no longer available at the listed price.

Wash, rinse, repeat. After the third (!) attempt to book a flight failed
because tickets were no longer available at that fare, she used the
old-fashioned toll-free number and booked tickets with a live person.

The content was more or less accessible. But the system was inaccessible
because some users could not act upon the offered choices before the
offered choices expired.

No kidding. Just for fun I just took a look at a few. Even for sighted
users, those airline reservation sites are confusing.

--
Adrienne Boswell
Please respond to the group so others can share

Adrienne <arbpen2003 (AT) sbcglobal (DOT) net> wrote:

No kidding. Just for fun I just took a look at a few. Even for sighted
users, those airline reservation sites are confusing.

So if they can show that even sighted people can't figure it out fast
enough to buy a ticket, there's no discrimination!

Kerberos said the following on 28/12/2004 17:03:

I just finished reading the WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative)
Recommandation document from the W3C here:
http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WAI-WEBCONTENT-19990505/
And I must say I'm quite discouraged. I really wanted to comply with
the recommandation, but the document is so theoric, there are
requirements beyond by possibilities especially regarding special
devices for impaired people.
How can I create a Flash presentation for deaf and blind people, and
for people who navigate using a braille navigation device without
either mouse or keyboard?
I think I'll just give up. Do you follow the WAI recommendations?
Do impaired people even use these "awkward" screen readers?

+ HTML
- Flash
= accessibility

Yes, "impaired" people use "awkward" screen readers.

What's interesting, imo, is - the more you understand the issues, the
more "interesting" the design challenges are.

Keep going.


--

John Robin Devany
http://www.devany.com

Darin McGrew wrote:

Adrienne <arbpen2003 (AT) sbcglobal (DOT) net> wrote:
Writing markup for impaired persons is not that difficult, and has
the
added benefit of being accessible by another "blind" user, Google.

I discovered a new kind of accessibility problem recently.

A blind computer user was trying to make airline reservations online.
The
web site generated such complex pages that by the time she read
enough of
it to understand what flight she wanted and how to book that flight,
tickets for that flight were no longer available at the listed price.

Wash, rinse, repeat. After the third (!) attempt to book a flight
failed
because tickets were no longer available at that fare, she used the
old-fashioned toll-free number and booked tickets with a live person.

The content was more or less accessible. But the system was
inaccessible
because some users could not act upon the offered choices before the
offered choices expired.

As you imply is really a usability problem rather than an accessibility
one in the sense that the W3C use the term accessible.

It is a classic case where the WAI approach is not actually helping the
user. The only way to deliver real benefits here would be to have a
user-interaction style well suited to visually impaired users -
possibly but not necessarily on an alternative version of the website.
I say not necessarily because sometimes you do the usability testing
and find that the new version is better for visually able users as
well.

--
Nic

nichughes (AT) mailandnews (DOT) com writes:

Darin McGrew wrote:
Wash, rinse, repeat. After the third (!) attempt to book a flight
failed because tickets were no longer available at that fare, she
used the old-fashioned toll-free number and booked tickets with a
live person.

The content was more or less accessible. But the system was
inaccessible because some users could not act upon the offered
choices before the offered choices expired.

As you imply is really a usability problem rather than an accessibility
one in the sense that the W3C use the term accessible.

To an extent. Because it's a far more severe problem for a sub-set of
users, I think it's also an accessibility problem.

That said, I tend to believe that most, if not all, accessibility
problems are also usability problems to some extent, and vice versa.

--
Chris

Chris Morris wrote:

To an extent. Because it's a far more severe problem for a sub-set of
users, I think it's also an accessibility problem.

In as much as the web page or service is capable of being reached then
it is accessible. That does not appear to be the problem here.

The fact that usability issues impact one sub-set of users more than
another may or may not be discriminatory depending on the definition of
discrimination you (or your legislators) have settled upon. That is an
entirely seperate matter to whether it was accessible.

That said, I tend to believe that most, if not all, accessibility
problems are also usability problems to some extent, and vice versa.

Personally I think that all the real problems are usability problems
and that accessibility is just one (in practice rather small) element
of that.

This really fits with the definition of the words. Accessible is
"capable of being reached" whereas usable is "able to be put to use"
which is both broader and more meaningful.IMHO.

--
Nic