Re: accessify.com's review of RNIB relaunch

tina@greytower.net wrote:

>Very well. Let me then set up a hypothetical situation. An author
>writes a document. He does not take into account any accessibility
>issues in particular, but he _does_ follow the grammar and spec of
>
>  (a) HTML 4.01 Strict
>  (b) XHTML 1.1
>
>Our author now publishes both documents on the WWW. In both cases he
>conforms to good standards-based development guidelines, and the
>specifications in question.
>
>Would you still say that alternative (b) is, in terms of accessibilty,
>better than alternative (a) for the vast majority (and minority) of
>users ?

I think the only accessibility difference between using valid HTML 
versus valid XHTML is that XHTML conforms to standard well-formed XML 
rules and could therefore be used and displayed by /any/ XML parser. The 
"accessibility" benefit doesn't necessarily relate to people with 
disabilities but instead just refers to "access for all".

Of course, as someone else on the list has previously brought to our 
attention, XHTML causes problems with SGML-capable parsers so the 
benefits might be outweighed depending on your audience.

I'm personally leaning toward support of newer XML parsers than SGML 
ones though.

Cheers,
James

-- 
http://www.cookiecrook.com/

Received on Wednesday, 25 June 2003 12:38:00 UTC