Erik Moeller wrote: But many of the changes that break accessibility aren't really to the _advantage_ of the majority of users, except in the sense of beautification. I think that the *default* wikipedia should be *highly accessible* in the sense put forward by Ruth. Everything about the site should be in line with normal standards, and nothing should astonish anyone. Gorgeous fancy stuff can be left optional. 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. --Jimbo

On 02 Jan 2003 15:55:47 +0100, Erik Moeller <e.moeller=Ui4TQZZ8pVAPyMaTEpOvjQ(a)public.gmane.org> wrote: (repeating this post to keep it in the correct list/newsgroup - sorry!) agreed Agreed - because there are so many linked words within the main text, interrupting the text flow is bad. 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.   assist non-visual browsers is to ensure that the page content comes as early as possible in the source code. Else on every page the user has to wade through the same long list of navigation. This can be achieved via CSS positioning. As a bonus, promoting the page content to the start of the source code gives a considerable boost to search engine rankings! As an example, try http://www.electec.co.nz/electrotec.mv - a site that looks graphics heavy and uses DHTML menus etc. but remains accessible. Try it in a screen reader, Lynx, or Opera with images and stylesheets off. Note that I have used css to "hide" punctuation in the navigation and lists - hence screen readers make a reasonable job of them. Incidentally, all screen readers I've tried have a separate function to read all the links on a page, so putting content first does not mean you have to listen to the entire page before you can navigate anywhere else. Most talking browsers are aiming to be useable with only half a dozen keys to control them. -- Richard Grevers Christchurch, New Zealand