Oliver_Henniges - 7:03 pm on Feb 20, 2006 (gmt 0)

A good idea to dedicate a separate forum to this topic. The number of contributions has grown rapidly the past few days, so if my question has been answered elsewhere please give me the relevant URL.

As I pointed out in another thread (http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum10/10919.htm [webmasterworld.com]) despite all justified criticism on client-side scripting, Javascript does have its very particular advantages. To give an example:

In addition to my php-based shop system I have a few special pages on some product-groups containing several lines of products with an input field for the requested number of items plus (at the bottom) a few input-fields for invoice- and shipping address and so on. In the background runs a javascript code which calculates the sums, taxes and traffic-fees, so that the user immediately sees how much he has to pay. Now, if a visitor is lead to this page by a search engine, he may order what he had been seeking without performing any other clicks. No need to reload the page after every change, thus very fast, very efficient, and very thankfully adopted by our customers.

My basic question is: How accessible is such a construction for disabled people, particularly visually impaired customers? How do the readers cope with changes in the content of form-fields performed by the java-script? I might provide an alternative link to the relevant WAI-conform "shadow-page" in my normal shop, but if these pages are not accessible anyway, I might do without eg. Alt-attributes in form fields at all, saving me a lot of work. So if VI-readers - as I assume - cannot handle javascript: How can I make clear "this page per se is not WAI-conform, please use the following alternative.." without the whole page not being accepted?

In the past I have considerably benefitted from the overlaps of VI-friendliness and search-engine-friendliness of my website. But I have the suspicion that this accessibility discussion might in the near future become part of google's approach "to make a better world ;)" Do you also think such unaccessible Javascript-pages are in danger to be thrown out of the index or maybe lowered in relevance?

[edited by: DrDoc at 3:44 am (utc) on Feb. 22, 2006]
[edit reason] linked to thread [/edit]