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Re: Business Benefits of Access-for-All Design

for

From: Terence de Giere
Date: Nov 27, 2002 8:52PM

The page http://www.ideal-group.org/World_Bank/index.asp (Business
Benefits of Access-for-All Design) has some problems: the server is set
to a mime type of text/plain instead of text/html. This page displays OK
in Internet Explorer, but other browsers display it as HTML code, not a
rendered web page.

Netscape 7, Lynx 2.8.4, and the W3C Amaya browser 6.4 all displayed
plain text. (I am rebuilding my computer after a crash and do not have
all my browsers reinstalled but three out of the four failing to display
this page as rendered HTML is a problem!). The page also uses the
Windows 1252 character set rather than the ISO 8859-1 character set.
HTML pages on this server appear to have the correct mime type set, but
ASP pages do not. I think this ASP page was saved from another server
since the server here is a UNIX machine running Apache. It should work
OK if the .asp extension is changed to .htm or .html. If the URL is
typed in as http://www.ideal-group.org/World_Bank/ the page renders OK
in the other browsers.

This is a point Jukka Korpela brought up a few days ago on the forum
(#213), that it does not matter what mime type is specified for the page
in the meta element, the server's setting will normally determine how a
page is rendered. The Internet Explorer browser seems to be an exception
here. I have had this problem with servers where the CSS files are given
the mime type of text/plain instead of text/css, and browsers like
Netscape 7 will not think it is a CSS file, but an ordinary *.txt file
and not format the page linked to it.

Just another detail that affects accessibility, even for visual users,
not typically mentioned in accessibility guidelines.

Terence de Giere
<EMAIL REMOVED>

Subject:
Business Benefits of Access-for-All Design
From:
"Michael R. Burks" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Date:
Wed, 27 Nov 2002 11:41:56 -0500
To:
< <EMAIL REMOVED> >


All,

for those with an interest, this is an updated version of Steve Jacobs
paper....the original was great! This one is better!

"Business Benefits of Access-for-All Design." The updated content appears
as follows:
http://www.ideal-group.org/World_Bank/index.asp


Sincerely,

Mike Burks




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