WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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Re: No decision from the Appeals court

for

From: Susan R. Grossman
Date: Sep 28, 2004 12:08PM

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>We are probably better off in the long run if we argue that the ADA doesn't apply to web sites and focus our efforts on educating web designers and stakeholders in web sites on the importance of good accessibility and usability practices. We've made huge progress recently in getting the word out to designers and getting trend setters like ESPN and Wired to move toward standards based design and thinking about accessibility, and I think that's how we should keep moving forward. The courts and Congress are not the right place to decide how web sites should be built.
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Your comments are a little disturbing. I don't beleive that legislation
would actual dictate how you do your mark-up, it would simply have end
rules like "must be accessible to screen readers over a certain
version/version date", not laws telling you that you must use an alt tag
between 15 & 40 chars containing no special characters and declaring the
authors name placed after a mandatory height tag with exactly one space
between (no non breaking spaces allowed) - or any such nonsense..

Getting the word out and promoting accessibility will never be enough
for those who beleive that aceessibility equals more money, and without
being part of ADA they'll be easy to continue to ignore.
Accessibilities standards aren't new... do you see everyone adopting
them based on our "grass roots" movement? I can't quite imagine a
corporate presentation to management brandishing a Wired article to
support their proposal for accessibility on their sites.

There are also many people out there who don't think disabled people are
"normal" and so shouldn't be considered in their demographics. That's
what ADA is trying to change, and I strongly feel we should be part of ADA .

So much for my rant.

Susan