While reading a recent article [1] about AJAX applications, I had a thought that will no doubt offend some, inspire others, and humor the rest. It seems that we are putting tons and tons of work into making sure our documents are structured correctly to work with things such as screen-readers and text-only displays - all good things indeed.
However, what I've noticed that you do not see are articles pushing the screen reader manufacturers to make more capable and intellegent readers for the browsers.....they seem to be able to do this for desktop applications (at least to a reasonable level). It seems that many of the efforts we are making (as well as the WSG) to enable accessibility are in fact disabling (and in many cases abandoning) the rich features on the net - this goes back to the whole "magazine article" site versus the "application" site - two different purposes, two different needs - both based on the same underlying technologies, and both need to be accessible. I'm not saying this should be / is easy - perhaps screen reader companies are already trying to do such a thing and I'm just ignorant to the latest development(s). I do however, find it curious that 90% of the burden has been placed on us as web developers, while any other market sector would simply point the finger back to the screen reader vendor and scream "You fix it..."????? Thanks for your time, Mike Yeaney References: [1] http://juicystudio.com/article/making-ajax-work-with-screen-readers.php ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
