Posted at 12:10 PM
"There are a small but growing number of products appearing on the market which claim to be able to produce an accessible website from an inaccessible one. These products are, in general:
- Based on the twin premises that creating a text-only version of a site addresses the accessibility requirements of users and the law, and that a text-only version is automatically accessible.
- Marketed on the basis that you don't have to do anything else in order to create an accessible website - simply put your (inaccessible) website in at one end, and get an accessible, text-only version of the site out at the other end.
Oh if only it was all true!"
Read the full article in RNIB's Web Access Centre.
Technorati subject tags: Accessibility, Web Accessibility, Web Standards
2 Comments:
Interesting article and very correct. There are too many companies claiming magic bullet solutions to web accessibility, without really understanding the implications.
However there are only so many steps that can be taken towards web accessibility by a tool author. And our initial marketing documentation doesn't make this as clear as it could do and I am aware that someone could misuse our product to create inaccessible code.
So where do you draw the line?
Hi Richard - you're not talking about Colony are you? If you are, then I'd just like to clarify that a content management system that produces compliant HTML code and which incorporates processes to help content authors create accessible pages is in a totally different league to the software I'm talking about in that article. I was talking about the server-side script stuff that parses an HTML page and automatically generates a text-only version, and particularly when it's marketed along the lines of:
"Worried your website is breaking the law? Don't have time to redesign your site to make it accessible? Don't worry - just install our software on your server and it will automatically create an accessible, text-only version of your site!"
That makes me angry, because those who know something about how these things work (and that has to include the people who develop the software) know that the original website has to be reasonably accessible in order for an automatically generated text-only version to be accessible (or even complete!). But the marketing is aimed at those who don't know that, and tries to convince them that the software will do all the work for them.
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