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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: Extensions to Internet Explorer that support people with disabilities and functional testing for accessibility

for

From: Jon Gunderson
Date: Mar 9, 2004 10:47AM

Clarification to what this extension to Internet Explorer does.

It does not make web content more accessible, it only makes web browsers more accessible by providing features that extend IE to allow all users to view and navigate the accessible markup. These IE extensions are only going to be most useful if authors follow WCAG recommendations sot that:

1. Link text does make sense out context. For examples a list of "click here" is useless, but this tool helps authors see there links out of context, so they can tell if the link text does provide meaningful information about a link.

2. MAP elements can be used with standard text links (not just the more popular use with AREA elements and images) to indicate collections of related links. This tool will allow people to navigate to those collections of links and to view information about those collections. Again without the author including these MAP elements to indicate collections of links, the feature is useless.

3. Headers is again something authors need to include for the list of headers functions to have any use.

In summary this extensino is not to remove authors responsibility to create accesible markup, but to reward authors who do create accessible markup by providing them with browser functions that allow them to actually benefit and test their accessibility features.

Jon




---- Original message ----
>Date: Tue, 9 Mar 2004 11:06:01 -0500 (EST)
>From: Access Systems < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
>Subject: Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: Extensions to Internet Explorer that support