This thread is quite interesting.

I see that the ADA regulations were revised recently, and will be taking 
effect 3/15/11 (http://www.ada.gov/regs2010/ADAregs2010.htm).

I wonder, to any ADA regulations cover this sort of thing, at least for 
government sites? How about guidelines for NGOs and other sites?

Please forgive me for not finding the answers myself.

-- 
-Eric 'shubes'

On 10/15/2010 09:38 AM, Steve Holmes wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 05:38:24AM -0700, JD Austin wrote:
>> It's probably good that you pointed that out Steve.  I've never been a
>> graphic designer but I've done a lot of websites in my time.  One of my 'big
>> beefs' with a lot of websites is that they make no effort whatsoever to be
>> usable with simpler browser technologies.
>> In a few cases I've sat down with someone and fired up lynx (or links) to
>> show someone what a blind person probably 'sees' on their site and more
>> importantly to them (usually and unfortunately) what Google will see when
>> they try to index their site.  That is REALLLY entertaining when it is an
>> all-flash site which neither lynx or Google can read :)
>
> Yes, text browsers are a good least common denominator though I'm sure
> web developers don't wanna be forced to restrict themselves to this
> lower functionality.  I also feel the text browsers need to step up
> some of their compatibility too.  I like elinks a lot for my text
> browsing activities but its javascript support is quite poor in my
> estimation.  But they still have their place; I can read blogs and
> other simple pages with it and elinks loads much faster than
> firefox:).
>
>> I've always suspected that sites that relied too heavily on JavaScript don't
>> work well or at all for people that are blind.  My non-scientific test for
>> most sites is to try to buy their product or get a critical piece of
>> information using only a text based browser like lynx or links. MANY times
>> it is that dumb piece of 'on click' code that is doing input validation that
>> is the gatekeeper prevented me from completing the sale or from changing
>> from one page to another.  I haven't tried that on an ajax / 'web2.0' site
>> but suspect I'd be SOL trying to use them.  How advanced are the screen
>> readers/etc now days?
>
> Like I said before, the javascript is non existant in many text
> browsers; I don't think lynx supports javascript at all and elinks, a
> distant cousin of links, has some javascript but more often than not,
> I can't depend on it and I run into a lot of "harmless" buttons which
> won't do anything at all in elinks but are essential to complete a
> transaction.  In the text area, many of us use Speakup, a set of
> kernel modules to provide a talking kernel and others use emacspeak, a
> facility to make emacs self voicing and then use w3 or w3m to web
> browsing.  I doubt either of those support javascript.  Now on the
> gnome side, Orca has been developed and is still growing as a screen
> reader but is plenty mature enough to make regular use of it.  When
> used with Firefox, most pages render pretty well and I've been to
> several ajax and other javascript pages with little difficulty.
> Personally as a blind person,, javascript doesn't bother me all that much
> from the a11y point of view.  In fact in some ways, I think Orca the
> free and open source screen reader for the graphical desktop in Linux,
> can outperform the web access offered by many Windows screen readers
> that people will pay a thousand dollars for.


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