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RE: Section 508 Standards Compliance and Scripts

for

From: Jon Gunderson
Date: Sep 4, 2003 11:01AM

At 12:06 PM 9/4/2003 -0400, you wrote:
>If the CMS developer had specified the conditions of accessibility such as
>JAWS/IE6, then I wouldn't have much of an issue with the statement - my
>assumption would be that they tested their product against this combination
>of applications and found that the content was "visible". It would also
>provide you with a recommendation for your users who require AT - they must
>use XXX to view the content.

In general Browser specific coding is bad design for the web. This limits
all users to specific combinations of technology and is exactly the
opposite of the original purpose and design of the web. The web is
designed to allow people to use a range of technologies and operating
systems to access information. As people use or design for proprietary
features of certain browser/AT combinations it makes it more difficult for
people with disabilities to access content. This can even be a problem for
people using older or newer versions of the technologies tested. So while
they may meet the letter of the law they are certainly not meeting the
spirit of the law.

Also new versions of HTML [1] will probably not allow this type of client
side writing of content using Javascript. The direction the W3C standards
are going with new recommendations is to use CSS display and visibility
properties to selectively display and hide content in the Document Object
Model. The major problem with writing using Javascript "write" commands is
that the Document Object Model and the content actually displayed in a
graphical rendering become very different. This is a problem for screen
readers since they need to figure out these differences and calculate what
the information that is actually on the screen. There are also validation
issues which javascript writes create. As XML becomes more prevalent,
validation is critical for technologies to work together.

Jon

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/


>As Paul wrote, true accessibility is a challenging target to hit but if the
>conditions have been specified, then it is easier to achieve.
>
>Jules
>
>
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Jon Gunderson, Ph.D., ATP
Coordinator of Assistive Communication and Information Technology
Division of Rehabilitation - Education Services
MC-574
College of Applied Life Studies
University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign
1207 S. Oak Street, Champaign, IL 61820

Voice: (217) 244-5870
Fax: (217) 333-0248

E-mail: <EMAIL REMOVED>

WWW: http://cita.rehab.uiuc.edu/
WWW: http://www.staff.uiuc.edu/~jongund



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