Nathan Rutman wrote:
I agree in that paragraphs contain single thoughts/topics, but do you think of someone speaking "in paragraphs?" I generally constrain that to written word, but perhaps that is not accurate.
I think this is more of an issue of nomenclature. The naming of elements in HTML was based too closely on the print world, but in structural/semantic markup, we're interested in the "concept" of a paragraph.
If this were not the case, we wouldn't have to go to extra lengths to make pages "accessible" for non-visual users.
The only time where you have to go the extra mile to make pages accessible is when you're adding elements that are exclusively visual: an image, a flash presentation, a quicktime movie, a pure audio file. There is *no* additional work involved in making a well structured, semantic document usable by blind or deaf users.
The fact that we have to add parameters and extra data for non-visual users should show us that the underlying framework is tailored to visual users.
Again, additional parameters are not needed unless the source data itself is purely audio/visual in nature. I don't need to add any extra parameters to my headings, paragraphs, etc to make a screenreader work with them, for instance.
Tape a 30 second conversation between a husband and a wife, and there are no "headers" or "pages". It's a different ball game.
Apples and oranges. Conversations are unstructured. They differ in their very nature from structured documents. However, you still have quite separate thoughts, logical groups within the conversation, which can be quite clearly delimited and structured.
That's easy: they need a tool to take what a browser would give them and instead provide the information to them in a format more meaningful to them.
That may have been true for screen scrapers (which used the visual output of the screen and read that out), but modern screenreaders access the DOM and source code directly
Unless you're willing to argue that a web browser is simply one of many tools (instead of the primary and intended tool) for viewing X/HTML information, this seems semi-obvious.
Actually yes, I am arguing that exactly.
If the structure was truly agnostic and unbiased towards visual presentation, you'd have people with perfect vision who would rather browse the web with a screen reader.
A red herring. Why would people with perfect vision, who have since early childhood relied on their capacity to see, be more likely to switch to an audio only browser? Additionally: how does podcasting strike you? Or new services like Talkr http://www.talkr.com/ ? And is it not mainly because screenreaders are traditionally very expensive pieces of kit (thousands of dollars)? With a wider availability of inexpensive solutions for modal access to content, I believe we WILL see more users choosing (depending on their situation) to access content in different ways. And that's what XHTML is about: marking up content, giving it structure. It's not a visual markup language. It's designers back in the 90s who made that assumption...
The idea that screen readers are for people who have hindered vision seems to point to a bias towards the visual presentation of X/HTML if available.
Visual rendering of content is only the most prevalent because accessibility was not an initial concern, and modal access to content was still a pipe dream. And I'm not disputing that the majority of users do have vision and use visual means to access content. That's not to say that the underlying technology has a bias towards them.
Accessibility, in my understanding (and I freely admit this could be a flawed understanding) is all about providing access to people without the ability to use a full-blown GUI, point-and-click web interface (whether due to disabilities or equipment [PDAs]).
No, it's about providing a device and capability agnostic way of accessing content. However, due to the history of the web, and the fact that even today designer's can't get over the "the web is visual" flawed paradigm, the main efforts in accessibility are those explaining how one must add additional effort in not creating barriers for users which might not have 20/20 vision or perfect hearing.
Ahh, but that's different. In those cases written language is serving the spoken, acting as notes.
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Sure, I want all people to be able to benefit from the sites I build, but the idea that X/HTML lends itself to auditory users as much as it lends itself to visual users I don't find very convincing.
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