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Re: CAn this page be saved from itself?

for

From: pcaldwell
Date: Sep 16, 2003 1:53AM

At 5:09 am -0400 Steven C. Perkins said

>Can this page be saved
>and made accessible?
>
>http://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/lawlibrary/default.asp
>
My reply:

Visiting that page with a Mac I was taken to this page:

http://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/lawlibrary/defaultmac.asp

This page proclaims itself as a "text-only page for Mac OS". Not
for those using assistive technologies, then.

The page consists of 193 links, and a search facility at the top
of the page: "quick site search" and "quick catalogue search".
There's no other text apart from a dozen introductory words at the
beginning. All the links have javascript-driven popups
substituting for title text, but no title or longdesc attributes.
A tabindex of '1' is specified for the "quick site search" box at
the top of the page, but not for the "quick catalogue search" box.
This is the only instance of tabindex, so the long list of links
is not accessible to the tab key.

As a sighted user with only slight difficulty using a mouse, for
me the text-only page is ideal: I'm in a library so the user
experience I want is the swift location and retrieval of
information, which this page provides.

I can't imagine that Cornell's "bricks and mortar" library is only
accessible to people with 20/20 vision and total mobility; I
wonder what the designers were thinking of.

Pauline


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