WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

RE: Bobby - Priority one compliance

for

From: Jukka Korpela
Date: Oct 1, 2002 6:52AM

Tom Gilder wrote:

> > http://www.enableall.org/ummbpcs/hrd-x/
>
> Erg, typical Bobby-fied page.

And a page that has serious accessibility problems that Bobby does not
complain about. To begin with, the text (especially the small text in white,
against light green background) is almost unreadable even to people with
fairly normal vision, and if I set my browser use larger font, the only text
that becomes bigger is "Best viewed using 800 x 600 screen resolution and
using Internet Explorer 5 and Shockwave Flash 4.0 plug-ins."

I think this demonstrates why accessibility checkers are of limited
usefulness. They seldom reveal the big problems (and sometimes they even
make things worse, when potentially misleading messages from them get
applied).

> Also, please note that "eng" isn't a valid language code.

I need to disagree here. It's probably not a code we should use at present,
since those few user agents that recognize lang attributes at all tend to
support two-letter codes only; but it's a correct code. On the other hand,
only a small fraction of world's languages has got (or can ever get) a
two-letter code. If you were authoring in a language that has no such code,
using a three-letter code is the correct move, even if we can't expect much
support in the near future.

There's quite some confusion around the language codes. I'm afraid I've made
my small contribution to the confusion by criticizing A-Prompt for using
three-letter codes and by calling that definitely incorrect. I have now
realized that the HTML 4.01 specification refers to RFC 1766 (with
two-letter basic codes) but mentions that it is expected to be updated, and
RFC 1766 itself _has_ now been superseded by RFC 3066 and RFC 3282. Besides,
the XML specification says (in clause 2.12) that "The values of the
attribute are language identifiers as defined by [IETF RFC 1766], Tags for
the Identification of Languages, or its successor on the IETF Standards
Track." Since RFC 3066 allows three-letter codes (as defined in ISO 639-2)
in addition to two-letter codes, "eng" must be regarded as correct, though
presumably not recommendable yet.

--
Jukka Korpela, senior adviser
TIEKE Finnish Information Society Development Centre
http://www.tieke.fi/
Diffuse Business Guide to Web Accessibility and Design for All:
http://www.diffuse.org/accessibility.html


----
To subscribe, unsubscribe, or view list archives,
visit http://www.webaim.org/discussion/