Re: Stumped

And consider, too, that most "on screen" stats counters use Javascript
and/or an image call to even register a visitor, while the bulk of
text-only and text-to-speech browsers support neither of these ..... not
surprising that all these stats don't show ANY text-only or
text-to-speech users visiting your page.

Numbers?  Well, the UK has a population of something like 55-60 million
last time I looked, and the Royal National Institute for the Blind
states that over 1.5 million are blind or visually impaired.  Assuming
that the incidence of visual impairment in the UK isn't that much
different to that in the USA, or the developed world as a whole, and
lets reckon only a third of them need to use an assistive browser of
some kind - figure how many millions of potential customers that
translates into.

The people who, arguably, stand to benefit in real terms more than many
others from the internet and the development of e-commerce are being
shut out for the sake of a little extra thought and care in terms of
design and coding, and a collective determination to make the web an
exclusively visual medium, rather than an information medium.  Quite
apart from the many pages which are simply non-existent to anything but
IE or NN, consider the difficulty of finding your way through a page
which has no structure coded into it, or worse, where the structure has
been distorted and mangled by a usage of HTML based entirely on "what
the page looks like", when your only means of accessing the information
is by way of listening to it or reading small portions of the page at a
time.  The structure which, if coded accurately, would provide you with
signposts and a route map around the information is, instead, simply the
equivalent of a flat, featureless plain or alternatively a convoluted
landscape where the signposts have all be altered and point in the wrong
directions.

If something is a heading, why call it a paragraph?  If it's a
paragraph, why disguise it as a blockquote?  If structure and
presentation were truly one and the same thing, then our javascript
would work fine regardless of the syntax we use, if we could only format
the script to look pretty.

In purely commercial terms, when you take the probable numbers of people
using assistive browsers, then add in all those browsing without
graphics and/or javascript and/or various plug-ins (like Flash for
example) through choice, then add in the increasing numbers trying to
access the web via other non-standard browsers like mobile phones, it
simply doesn't make any sense, to me, to deliberately code pages in such
a way as to exclude them all from a site.  Not when, frequently, it
would only take a few minor changes to open those pages up and make them
as accessible, albeit in a different form, to these people as to
everyone else.

Regards,
Donna
--
dms(at)zetnet.co.uk
Different Worlds:  http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/dms/
Pictures of the Past, The Leslie Smith Family,
An Introduction to HTML, Copyright Considerations
Online Bookshop

----- Original Message -----
From: H. G. Quinn <hgquinn(at)attglobal.net>

> And don't forget that most screen readers are _not_ Java enabled, so
will
> _not_ tell the servers what browser type they are.  They don't even
appear
> in the stats.
>
> I spoke to a sales rep for one of the most popular screen reader apps,
and
> she said that Java/Javascript support is in the works, but they need
> additional development funding.  Catch-22 -- they can't prove people
are
> actually using their app because the app is not Java-enabled, so they
can't
> get funding based on market share, because no one can measure their
> effective market share, and w/o funding, they won't have the money to
> complete the Java enablement effort.  )-:

HWG hwg-techniques mailing list archives, maintained by Webmasters @ IWA