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Re: Text Versions

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Aug 20, 2004 1:38PM

On Fri, 20 Aug 2004, rcarrill wrote:

> Thank you again for all the info on the text versions. I feel the same
> way..

Sorry... what info, what way? It's easy to lose context in E-mail
discussions.

> Anywho what about..
>
> An A-Z indexed text version used as the format for the "Text version."

Pardon? A-Z indexed text version for what, and why?

> I want to accomplish 2 things. 1. get rid of the site map we use use an a-z
> index and 2. use it as the Text version.

Sorry, I cannot see what you mean. An alphabetic list of all pages is most
probably very useful. (Calling it "site map" is not that useful, but
common parlance I guess.) Why get rid of it?

Why would you create a text version? Text versions almost always work
against accessibility.

(I recently realized yet another reason to say "no" to text versions:
authors - designers, content providers - rarely use text versions
themselves. They might test them, somehow, at an early stage. But they
stop using them, sticking to the normal version. They won't see the
problems that emerge later, and they don't _experience_ the pages as text
versions.)

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/