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Re: Question about web page "remediation"

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From: Jan Heck
Date: May 17, 2013 1:15PM

This is indeed one of the cases we're dealing with. When you say "batch
repairs," are you talking about applying a "find and replace" function to
multiple pages at a time within a standard web editor, or is there another
program you used?

Thanks to everyone who has responded so far!

Jan

On 5/17/13 12:03 PM, "Iaffaldano, Michelangelo"
< <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

>Jukka, there is an area where " such processing has a positive impact on
>accessibility". A few years, in one large website migration project we
>found that, for example, whenever the pages had
><SPAN><FONT=3 COLOR=BLUE>Bla bla</FONT><SPAN><BR><BR>
>
>they really meant
><h1>Bla bla</h1>
>
>These constructs (i.e. semantics implied in presentational markup) were
>applied with surprising consistency, so that we were able to do some
>batch repairs and strip the rest. The manual cleanup after we ran the
>agent was minimal.
>
>However I do not know if this is the case for Jan's project.
>
>Michelangelo
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Jukka K. Korpela [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ]
>Sent: May 17, 2013 3:11 AM
>To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
>Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Question about web page "remediation"
>
>2013-05-17 2:57, Jan Heck wrote:
>
>> Does anyone happen to know of a tool that will strip out inline styles
>> and other "nasty" stuff in old legacy web pages?
>
>There are probably tools that do such things, but I doubt whether such
>processing has any (positive) impact on accessibilility. After all, what
>can you do with <p style="font-family: Verdana">? I mean if you were a
>computer program. You could introduce an id attribute for the element,
>carefully generating an id value that is unique on the page, remove the
>style attribute, and put a style sheet rule like #dvbkzh12 {
>font-family: Verdana } into a style element or an external style sheet.
>This would not make the source code more readable, and it would not
>affect the visual or other rendering, so what would be the point?
>
>If you meant that inline styles would be just removed, then, well, you
>would change the visual appearance of the page, and it would be very hard
>to predict the total effect - or its impact, in any, on accessibility.
>
>> I don't believe HTML Tidy does that
>
>HTML Tidy has the option of "cleaning up" inline styles (style
>attributes) and presentational markup. Here is an example, using the
>online version http://infohound.net/tidy/ on the document
>
><title>foo</title>
><p style="font-size: 120%">bar</p>
><font face=Verdana>foo</font>
>
>The result is:
>
><!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
> "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
>
><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
><head>
> <meta name="generator" content> "HTML Tidy for Linux/x86 (vers 25 March 2009), see www.w3.org" />
>
> <title>foo</title>
> <style type="text/css">
>/*<![CDATA[*/
> span.c2 {font-family: Verdana}
> p.c1 {font-size: 120%}
> /*]]>*/
> </style>
></head>
>
><body>
> <p class="c1">bar</p><span class="c2">foo</span> </body> </html>
>
>In which sense would this be an improvement? The class names do not say
>anything, so the code has become less readable. The names are
>conveniently short, at the cost of being generated in a faulty way: HTML
>Tidy does not check whether the original page actually contains the
>classes c1 and c2!
>
>> I'm trying to help a non-profit make their site accessible, and the
>> code is horrendous.
>
>Horrendous code generally needs to be abandoned, not improved. The more
>horrendeous it is, the more it costs to fix it, and the cost is generally
>larger than the cost of redesigning and rewriting the site.
>
>But even horrendous code can be relatively accessible. If it's not
>broken, don't fix it. If it has essential accessibility problems, then
>you may consider fixing them if you can - this can be fairly easy in some
>cases, or it can be hopeless (without rewriting everything). It really
>depends on the code and on the accessibility problems.
>
>Yucca
>
>
>
>>>