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Andrew Dupont

“These days many coders seem to defer to accessibility tools as if they’re Gospel, and end up carving up their markup like a Christmas goose to adhere to them, making other, far more used rendering tools and users suffer because of it.”

I have to agree with this. If we keep giving screen readers a free pass, then this situation won’t get any better — what if we’d made excuses for Internet Explorer 5.0?

It is especially critical for non-visual user agents (screen readers, spiders, etc.) to respect semantics, since that’s the only way they can infer meaning. We need to hold their feet to the fire — JAWS, Window-Eyes, Home Page Reader — just like we did with IE. In the meantime, we can provide alternate interfaces where required for accessibility.