[LINK] Fwd: vip-l: Article: The Impending Collision Of Accessibility and Rich Internet Applications

[Tom Worthington]

At 08:23 PM 11/04/2007, Jan Whitaker wrote:
>given recent discussions of Web2.0:
>
>>The Impending Collision Of Accessibility and Rich Internet 
>>Applications By Rob Garner
>>
>>... On one side of the discussion, the National Federation of the 
>>Blind (NFB) is pressing corporations in the state courts on the 
>>issue of designing accessible, text-based Web sites for the 
>>visually impaired who use screen readers
>>such as JAWS.  On the other side, cutting-edge Web developers and 
>>user-experience gurus are designing rich Internet applications for 
>>better user experience in a Web 2.0 world ...

Many of the Web 2.0 applications are not really web sites but are 
interactive computer applications, using the web browser for the user 
interface. There is no reason why these can't be made accessible, but 
it will take more and different techniques to those used for static web pages.

Gavin Dispain, from the Web Standards Group gave a lecture at the ANU 
last week in Canberra on accessibility of Australian Government web 
sites 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2007/04/gavin-dispain-and-web-standards-in.html>. 
These seemed to do well. In contrast Dey Alexander's survey of 
Australian University web sites a few weeks ago seems to indicate 
they are getting worse, rather than better 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2007/04/making-australian-universities.html>.

Perhaps we should stop worrying about just web pages and include word 
processing, presentation and PDF documents, as well, then AJAX and Web 2.0.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                http://www.tomw.net.au/
Visiting Fellow, ANU      Blog: http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/atom.xml