And if you want to help improve accessibility, blind people need a screen reader that isn’t crap.
What’s the point of semantic markup for accessibility when the most basic markup that is both presentation and semantic ( ) is ignored? Ian’s brief summary is that if you want to make your page readable in JAWS you’d do better by paying attention to punctuation (which does get read) than to markup. In summary, JAWS is a horrible experience, and as an example it didn’t even understand paragraph breaks (where the reader would be expected to pause). The second post was Ian Hickson’s description of using a popular screen reader ( JAWS) - you’ll have to dig into the article some, as it’s embedded in other wandering thoughts. But the comments just seemed to reinforce the belief that because it should work, that it would work. If the discussion had clearly ended at this point, I would have deducted points for those people use advocated longdesc based on bad judgement, but it would not have effected my trust because anyone can mispredict. Empirically they ( Ian Hickson in particular) found that the attribute was almost never used in a useful or correct way, rendering it effectively useless. Where alt is typically used as a placeholder for the image, and a short description, longdesc can point to a document that describes the image in length. The first post is about the longdesc attribute, an obscure attribute intended to tell the story of a picture. There are two posts that together have greatly eroded my trust in accessibility advocates, so that I feel like I am left adrift, unwilling to jump through the hoops accessibility advocates put up as I strongly suspect they are pointless. And so many boil-the-ocean proposals are made, and even become codified by standards, but markup standards are useless unless embodied in actual content, and this is where accessibility falls down.
They believe - with of course some justification - that the world must be made right. I fear this moral certainty has led people self-righteously down unwise paths. There is a kind of moral certainty to the argument that we should be making a world that is accessible to all people. This isn’t just What Tool Is Right For The Job. Is Python or Ruby better? We can talk shit on the web, where all emotions get mixed up and weirded, but in person these discussions tend to be quite calm and reasonable.ĭiscussions about accessibility, however, have strong moral undertones. When having technical discussions it’s hard to get that heated up. It’s not surprising to me that the first time I’ve gotten an actively negative reaction to a talk it was about accessibility. Someone then yelled out something like "what about blind people?" The argument being that screen readers would like to distinguish between the two, as not all things we render as italic would be read with emphasis. There are those people who feel they can separate the two, creating semantic markup that represents their intent, but they are so few that the reader can never trust that the distinction is intentional, and so and must be treated as equivalent. That is, presentation and intention are the same. I think it came up when I was making my lies and is truth argument.
Somewhat to my surprise this got me a heckler (of sorts). Well that’s a trivialization, but I have the privilege of trivializing my arguments all I want. So I gave a presentation at P圜on about HTML, which I ended up turning into an XML-sucks HTML-rocks talk.