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Re: use of <pre> tag

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Nov 5, 2010 10:54AM

On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 10:19 AM, Simius Puer wrote:

> At the end of the day would you honestly try to argue in a court of law that
> a lengthy legal document written inside a <pre> tag constitutes as
> accessible? Would you even hint at advocating that approach to the people
> on this list?

Of course I wouldn't. And I haven't. I could, however, easily make an
argument in a court of law that such a document is Section 508
compliant. There's a big difference between "accessible" and
"compliant".

You have suggested several times that such a document is automatically
"inaccessible" - a word that suggests a total inability to access. I'm
arguing that most anybody could read the content of the document and
generally make sense of it. They could access it. However, with
headings, it would be much more accessible, much further along the
continuum of accessibility.

Because something is non-compliant does not mean it's "inaccessible" -
no more so than a document that is fully compliant is automatically
"accessible" to everyone. Calling something "accessible" or
"inaccessible" is useless without quantifying how or to whom that
thing is accessible or inaccessible.

Jared