I attended this meeting and was struck by the big companies attitide towards providing accessible sites. They seemed to think that we should be very grateful if they deign to provide different interfaces for different audiences, as many other companies just 'dont care' about accessibility and you can just 'take it or leave it'.

What about an 'open content' policy?
Companies would allow non-commercial 3rd parties to mine their sites to present their information in formats different to their own offering. People could write and distribute apps that sat on your own PC and re-purposed the content on demand.

This means that there could be potentially 1000's of different interfaces onto existing sites that would meet the needs of all the diiferent user groups. If the companies wanted to make it even easier, they could provide access to XML feeds of their products and services data.

But of course, they want to control the 'user experience' and wouldn't dare let amateurs meddle with their advertising policy or branding.

So maybe we should just be grateful if they actually provide more than one view of their site, and maybe if we write enough letters more companies might provide accessible versions of their sites.

Or perhaps we should join the 'consumer-disobedience' movement and start to take some control over what we see through our peepholes.

Posted by: Mac on July 11, 2002 10:43 AM

 

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Posted by: Joe Clark on July 11, 2002 11:10 AM