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Re: Standards question

for

From: Steve Green
Date: Sep 15, 2009 4:00PM

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Jukka K. Korpela
Sent: 15 September 2009 22:42
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Standards question

Mark Guisinger wrote:

> I was hoping to be able
> to leave the JavaScript and other programmatic objects out of the
> standards.

Whatever the meaning of that statement might be, the approach is wrong.

You should aim at being accessible to different people, not at meeting some
"standards" and making that easy.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/



Whilst I agree entirely with your sentiment, it is not that easy in
practice. Many (perhaps most) of us are working with developers who neither
know nor care about accessibility and will only implement accessible design
insofar as they are required to by a contractual obligation to achieve a
technical standard.

Frequently they are not starting off with a blank sheet, but inaccessibility
is already built into their development environment, CMS, code libraries
etc. Getting them to do anything more than the absolute minimum is
impossible, so our objective has to be to prove that the standards require
the things we want them to do.

Sad, but that's the reality.

Steve Green
Director
Test Partners Ltd