On 02 Jan 2003 15:55:47 +0100, Erik Moeller e.moeller=Ui4TQZZ8pVAPyMaTEpOvjQ@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.