Re: Lies, Damned Lies & Statistics

Bravo!  I had this discussion today because I am trying to introduce
accessibility issues at the company I work for.  The sad part was the person
I was talking with had used an argument just a couple of days previously
regarding doctypes.  He said no one uses them, so why should he bother.  He
said the same about accessibility & also added that he was sick of the
"lowest common denominator" school of web design.  I was incensed, & told
him that there was no need to "dummy down" a page for accessibility purposes
like one would when coding for lower version browsers, but instead, if he
had read the specs I had handed out at the staff meeting he would see that
it isn't too hard to make great pages that are not "dumbed down" & still be
completely accessible.  I just took over a site, & have many pages to redo
because of invalid code, & am making them accessible while I am at it.  The
only part I can't do is put text links on the page (yet) because the client
hasn't been approached about doing this to their site.  They don't know that
everything I have done so far for them has passed Bobby's validator & that
their site is already accessible...the funny part of it is that the site
concerns health issues, & should be a site that is accessibility-aware.

Thanks for allowing my rant...
Lady Wist
----- Original Message -----
From: "John Allred" <allred(at)its.state.ms.us>
To: <hwg-techniques(at)hwg.org>
Sent: Tuesday, October 31, 2000 9:07 AM
Subject: Re: Lies, Damned Lies & Statistics


| I love these discussions, because they keep an important issue up front
for
| discussion.
|
| >From my perspective, if everyone in the design community would pledge to
| read through the WAI materials on the W3C site and the AWARE materials on
| the HWG site, the whole web would be better off. [snip]
 A final thought: don't confuse the effort to create a design that displays
| consistently across multiple browsers with accessibility. If we get bogged
| down in trying to make a page appear identically for all browsers, we
| probably lose site of the (to me) more important issue: whether everyone
| has access to the information, no matter how it appears to them.
[snip]

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