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Re: Business Benefits of Access-for-All Design

for

From: Terence de Giere
Date: Dec 1, 2002 9:24PM

Holly --

Michael Burks put this page up
(http://www.ideal-group.org/World_Bank/index.asp) as a nice example of
what needs to be done to provide better accessibility on the web. I had
some problems accessing this page, and we seem to be in a discussion of
those problems which is off the track of the original idea Mr. Burks had
in posting the page. Some changes have been made since I made these
comments.

I however am still having some trouble with the original URL Michael
posted. Opera 6.05 gives me a server side redirect to the desired page
as an HTML page (the server now posts a page with a link to follow to
get to a page with the *.html extension). Opera 7 gives me HTML code and
no way to get at a form of the page I can read. However this browser is
a beta. Other browsers I have except Opera 6.05 and Internet Explorer 6
do not respond to the redirect and just show the web page as HTML code.
It is basically a problem with the server on which the page is posted,
which has wrong settings. All Netscape browsers failed. Lynx failed. In
case a few others might have problems getting to the page URL Michael
posted, this one should work:

http://www.ideal-group.org/World_Bank/index.htm

This is page the redirect gets the user to if it works. Thank you
Michael for posting this information.

----------------------------

Since we are off track here, Opera 7, which I have just seen for the
first time, has some especially good accessibility features and options
that should help make accessible design easier to evaluate. It still
seems a bit quirky.

* The author mode now supports alternate linked author stylesheets.
* It supports metadata navigation links like the Mozilla browsers,
but there are some differences.
* The user mode has a number of cool features - a basic
accessibility mode, a text browser emulation mode, toggling tables
on or off, high contrast modes, show images and links only mode,
hide images not in links, and a mode to show tag names.
* As with Opera 6, Quick preferences allow the user to quickly turn
off various multimedia features, to turn scripting on and off etc.
One still must go to the regular preferences to turn off automatic
redirection.

Some of these possibilities were found in earlier versions of Opera, but
they are more on the surface now and easier to get at. One can with this
browser very quickly get a variety of visual and functional alternatives
to the page author's visual design and function and evaluate whether the
design will still be usable and functional and accessible with the
alternatives.

The browsers that support user style sheets do not seem to override
inline styles. That would be because according to the specification, an
embedded style sheet, and inline styles can override a linked
stylesheet. The browsers do not appear to disable author styles
altogether when linking a user stylesheet. The best way to look at a
page with inline styles without styles is to use a browser like Netscape
3.0 which does not support style sheets. Opera 7 seems to be able to do
a better job of this than Internet Explorer, but inline styles still get
through even in the user modes. Opera has sometimes been called the
webmaster's browser, and this new release certainly provides good
support for that view. It offers more rendering options for testing
accessibility than any other browser, even though it cannot fully
replace other access technologies, such as screen readers, for testing
pages. The Opera 7 beta for Windows is available at:

http://www.opera.com/

Terence de Giere
<EMAIL REMOVED>




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