[thelist] Re: accessibility: suggestions/recommendations for commercial site and coding standard

Techwatcher techwatcher at accesswriters.com
Sat Jun 1 01:54:01 CDT 2002


Hi, Chris --

There is absolutely no reason I'm aware of NOT to use XHTML standards.
I have been using them for a couple of years now, with
the "transitional" DTD statement, and they are completely backward-
compatible. So your issue really boils down to CSS vs. table kludges.

Is it possible to write your summary of the tables such that you comply
with the accessibility standards by *explaining* the table is only
laying out... whatever it's laying out? Is it possible to test for the
browser at the top of your site and direct the browser to a separate
subdirectory if it is NOT CSS-compliant? (I want to recode my whole
site replacing table kludges with CSS, and this is my plan... using
Backup&Replace'Em to generate the new pages from the old ones... but
then I use a very standardized plan for almost all of my pages.)

CSS was designed to be "gracefully degradable," meaning users will
still get the content even if the visual result is ugly -- so have you
thought carefully about your site from the content perspective, rather
than as visual elements? I suspect anyone who can't think of a page (or
site) except as visual elements won't be able to write good CSS.
Do you think of your page as content, or visual elements (as in
a "table of contents," rather than "the block at the top of each
page")? If you're thinking "visual elements," try to change your
perspective before you try to change your pages!

If the site is heavy on text, good margins and so on are important, but
so is low visual clutter. My table kludge (accesswriters.com) it to use
images (small icons) on each side of a text column in my pages (for
writers; very heavy on text!), but at the top of each page, I introduce
each icon with a key (i.e., the welcome mat returns you to our Home
Page; the other icon returns you to this Table of Contents). This
should make it accessible (along with ALT tags which name each icon
thereafter, I believe.

Cheers --
Carol Stein
techwatcher at accesswriters.com
_____________________________________

Message: 22
Date: Fri, 31 May 2002 12:50:07 -0700
From: "Chris W. Parker" <cparker at swatgear.com>
To: <thelist at lists.evolt.org>
Subject: [thelist] accessibility: suggestions/recommendations for
commercial site and coding standard
Reply-To: thelist at lists.evolt.org

hi.

i can understand using XHTML/CSS (no tables, etc., validation) on a
personal site seeing as how the person making the site might not care
whether or not it works for everyone. or for that matter looks good in
every viewers browser.

but i'm working on a commercial site right now and it currently doesn't
use any doctype or validation or any sort of standard for that matter
(it hasn't gone live yet.) the problem is that i've taken the homepage
and recoded a test version that validates in HTML 4.01. now although it
looks fine in ie6, mozilla 1, ns6 and opera 6, it looks like shit in
ns4.x. the old version of the homepage that didn't adhere to any
standards and used a crappy css file looks better than the "new and
improved" experimental page.

so, what would you people suggest i do? it's not really viable to go
back and redesign the site to better fit the standards, so i need to
either keep it the old way, or... or i don't know what.

thanks,
chris.


Cheers



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