Demaestro - 8:09 pm on Oct 3, 2007 (gmt 0)

Before I rant I will say I think anyone who alienates a potential customer is a fool.

BUT....

I find the parallel that they are trying to draw between physical access to a physical location and virtual access to a virtual location to be quite insane.

The reality is they have access to the site.... If they can hit the front page then they have just accessed the site.....they just can't navigate it and possibly not be able to detect any content.

So is the issue that they must have access? If so then we have nothing to change.

Or is the issue that they have to be able to navigate the site? If so a statement like "....Web site is inaccessible to the blind" is not true. They need to be more diligent in pointing out the technical aspect of what is wrong with the site and not to use words like "inaccessible".

To make a site "inaccessible" to someone based on someones vision you would need a htaccess script that could tell if the user had vision.

If (user = blind) {raise "403Forbidden"} else {url = '/index.html'}

Now that would make a site inaccessible to the blind.

Instead of piggybacking off legislation that couldn't have possibly envisioned website access as part of it's purpose they should create new legislation that would outline what screen readers need to work. What disabled access means for a website. Trying to map over the terms to make sense in the web world is crazy... ask yourself what does "access" mean when talking about a web page? It is just the wrong term. As are 1000 of terms meant for the real world not the digital one.

I know this is nit picky but we have enough of this crap where they try to put laws meant for a physical world to the digital one and expect it all to translate over and make sense.... The fact is that it doesn't and most of those laws were written before there was a web.. sometimes even before there were computers. So how can we apply them?

The virtual world and the physical one are not the same... not even a little bit... we need law specific to both.

That all being said make your sites work for screen readers.

[edited by: Demaestro at 8:10 pm (utc) on Oct. 3, 2007]