when is some too much? WAS RE: [thelist] Link Types

[Aleem]

I am no accessibility freak, but am conscious of accessibility issues.
In fact, accessibility is quite easy to deal with, but that's my
opinion. Think of it this way: would you consider putting up a
plain text file (as in a .txt file) on a web site inaccessible? Now
what if this file was on the web with a .html extension and the
necessary html, head, body... tags? And what if you then added simple
tags for headings lists etc... you get the idea.

If you can make sure your site looks good in lynx, then you are more
than halfway there (web-based lynx emulator someone pointed out on the
list long time back: http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html - but
you're best off downloading a win32 emulator).

CSS, XHTML and other newer technologies have implicit accessibility
features, so if you use them, you're already making your site's somewhat
accessible. In the past I used to test my sites in older browsers, but
eventually got sick of it. Now I just make sure that my structure and
layout is fine. This is not very hard to achieve, and any Information
Architect will recommend to you, that you should always start off with
the plain xhtml file (that is design your structure), and only then move on to
the CSS.

Most of the disabilities brought up on this thread so far and how
being aware of each one is the only way to deal with is completely
unnecessary. They are not a problem you have to tackle as a web
developer, since they are tackled on the client side. If a person has
no fingers, that's not an issue you have to deal with, I'm sure they
have an alternate keyboard and if you didn't use accesskey's that
would be totally fine. Same goes for blurred vision, color blindness
and all the others (they have spectacles, lower resolutions, high
contrast themes and special UAs).

Simply put, just use a text based browser, start off with XHTML and
then pretty it up with CSS. I'd love to hear from someone why that is
not enough because I've always considered this to be enough?

Aleem

[ http://members.evolt.org/aleem/ ]