[gui-talk] an I.e8 inquiry

[Hoffman, Allen]

James Pepper wrote:
The big problem here is that designers cannot design webpages for
accessibility under the old standards, they are hardly going to be able
to do it for the new standards.

First of all, developers can code to the old standards quite well, but
generally do not include such coding in their standard practices.  This
is due to many factors, including lack of priority by those who set
their requirements, e.g. the guy with the money, and a general lack of
professional and institutional inclusion of these requirements in
education.  Blaming developers for something that is larger than
individual developer won't help, and places blame inaccurately, and in
the end is just too simplistic.

The new standards, while more complex, will be more used if, developer
tools include them as part of standard operation, and not following such
accessibility standards becomes an intentional choice.  For example, if
a developer places an image on the page, a bubble should pop up and note
an alternate description is required to meet WCAG standards.
Additionally, if ARIA interface elements are missing appropriate
accessibility attributes, developers should actually have to override
the defaults to get them saved for publication.  Finally, most Web
development tools do leave traces as to their use in the background
commented code of a page.  once a list of tools which, if used per plan,
produce accessible outputs is known, one can then in theory locate
people who go out of their way to produce inaccessible pages.  Such
folks should be targeted for feedback, since not only are they not
meeting people with disabilities needs, but they have done so
intentionally, not from lack of knowledge or ability, but for some other
reason.

furthermore, more emphasis must be placed on getting meeting
accessibility requirements in to standard IT professionals minimum
acceptable certification processes.  It is hard to expect we'll improve
overall accessibility of IT products if the people who develop and
invent them don't understand the needs, nor the technical solutions to
meet those needs.



Allen Hoffman