[Wikipedia-l] Re: Accessibility? : Was - Suggestion to promote readability of hyperlinkeddocuments.

Thu Jan 2 18:21:03 UTC 2003

On 02 Jan 2003 15:55:47 +0100, Erik Moeller 
<e.moeller=Ui4TQZZ8pVAPyMaTEpOvjQ at public.gmane.org> wrote:

> On Don, 2003-01-02 at 15:22, Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
>> You didn't quite say anything like this, but there's a risk here of an
>> attitude: "If the blind people don't like the default underlining,
>> they can always go into the options settings and do this, or they can
>> always write their own CSS style sheet to do that."  That's a bad
>> attitude.  Blind people just won't bother.  Color blind people who
>> find the site unusable aren't likely to bother, either.  They'll just
>> go away sad.
>
> 1) The site is not unusable if the broken/non-broken indicator is not
> displayed.

Agreed

> 2) Using an indicator like the previous ugly ? as the default has a
> negative usability effect on a much larger number of users.

Agreed - because there are so many linked words within the main text, 
interrupting the text flow is bad.
>
> 3) The proper thing to do is to enable CSS for text-to-speech and
> Braille readers in order to transmit the link state information without
> a notable effect on average users.

Proper, but in all practicality, pointless. I have done quite a bit of 
testing of websites in various talking browsers. Most use the IE rendering 
engine and simply read the text that ends up on screen. They are almost 
totally dependent on punctuation, and don't respect breaks in HTML (even 
list items or table cells). Thus the entire left-hand bar on Wikipedia 
would be read as one long sentence - "Main page recent changes random page 
current events" etc. None of them know anything about CSS. I believe there 
is one project (currently only Linux-based) to build a browser which 
understands aural css. Note that I have not tested some of the expensive 
products like Jaws, but they make no claims in their promotional material 
that suggest they are anything beyond a screen reader like all the rest.