[thelist] link borders on a MAC

[Wade Armstrong]

On 9/22/03 Maisha Walker <maisha at e-vent.org> wrote:

>
>I am indeed an accessibility advocate.  But I do think there are times
>when other objectives outweigh the value that accessibility offers.
>
>In this situation - where the content is several hundred images of his
>work, I found it hard to justify.

Maisha:

I think you've gotten good advice here from a variety of folks, but I
think it's important to point out that "accessibility" is not just about
letting the visually-imparied use your site. For instance, the link
borders that you've been trying to remove are, obviously, of no value to
the blind. The people they do help are those who prefer to use the
keyboard to control their browser and navigate you site. By turning them
off, you require those that can use a mouse to switch from keyboard to
mouse, and those who cannot use a mouse (those with motor skills
difficulties, for example) simply cannot use your site.

Alt tags can help people who can see but have various difficulties,
perhaps some kind of visual aphasia, and, as was pointed out earlier,
those who surf with images turned off.

Now, it's true that alt tags take work. And, unlike others on this list,
I do believe there's a point under which your client is not paying you
enough to implement alt tags. No site is perfect!

In the future, when making sites that catalog visual works, consider
using a database to store your images and their information. It's a lot
of trouble to insert alt tags on many pages; it's pretty easy to keep a
good database catalog of all images with titles and descriptions and
then display different works using simple scripts.

Wade