[thelist] Perkins School for the Blind's new site

[Joshua Olson]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ben Gustafson" <Ben_Gustafson at lionbridge.com>
Sent: Friday, September 13, 2002 10:37 AM


> The Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, Massachusetts, recently
> launched a new site designed for access by the blind and visually impaired
> (http://www.perkins.pvt.k12.ma.us). It features configurable readability
via
> CSS and cookies, and shows that you can design a good-looking site and
still
> keep it fully accessible.

Definitely, it's kinda neat.

> I was struck, though, by its lack of a traditional navigation bar, relying
> instead on the home page or site map (along with links within the current
> section at the bottom of the page). Does an accessible site need to be
> harder to navigate?

I can see why they do this.  The screen reader will get to the content
quicker without having to read the redundant navigation on every page.  They
probably could've accomplished the same thing by putting the navigation on
the right hand side or did some sort of table trick or floating div trick to
put the nav on the left while still having it farther down the HTML code.
Their approach to having a link to the navigation is someone novel and kinda
neat.  I applaud the effort.

> The writeup in the Boston Globe shows the danger of writing about a
> technology you half understand. It says that, "Using Cascading Style
Sheets
> technology, the site offers a customization feature that allows users to
> select a variety of settings[...]. CSS creates a database of the user's
> preferences and is easily updated."
>
(http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/255/west/Perkins_School_expands_its_Web_s
> ite_for_blind+.shtml) Since when is CSS a database?

I think what they mean is that your personalized settings are stored in a
database an retrieved when the CSS file is rendered.

-joshua