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WebWord Weblog Posting Posting Date: April 12, 2003 Digital radio 'shuns' the blind (bbc.co.uk) -- "They have come very close to designing something which is unusable, or at least very difficult for us, perhaps the most avid, hungry and, let's face it, needy group of radio listeners."
Reader Comments...
So there's one law for the old media and another for the new. I'll include a reference to this in my rant about the unreasonableness of web accessibility legislation. Posted by: Philip Chalmers on April 12, 2003 06:54 PM
I think your rant is somewhat misguided. The reason so much is said about web accessibility is that the web, by default, is the most widely accessible medium there is, it usually only becomes completely inaccessible when developers go out of their way to make life difficult. A reasonably competent web developer will be producing reasonably accessible sites anyway, it needn't cost anything, and an accessible site will usually work best for search engines, work well on things like mobile phones, etc. One area in which I do agree with the article to some extent is screen readers. I've used a couple recently and they're absolutely hopeless, I'm shocked that people have to put up with such rubbish. JAWS, apparently the leading product, hasn't got a clue about how to handle web pages, it seems to try to make intelligent judgements about how to present the page and fails miserably, coping worst with pages which are built to be most accessible, instead of sensibly just following the markup. For the web to be truly accessible we're going to need screen readers to make progress as well as developers.
Ya, that rant will come back to haunt him. The virtual future is accessible. Deal with it. Posted by: on April 13, 2003 01:02 PM
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