“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.
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.