ADA and Web Pages

[Thomas Dowling]

>From: NFML at aol.com
>To: Multiple recipients of list <web4lib at library.berkeley.edu>
>Date: Friday, April 18, 1997 7:49 AM
>Subject: ADA and Web Pages

>My apologies if this topic has come up recently and I missed it.  Our
>webmaster is looking for information on making our library webpages more
>accessable to blind users.  His main question is whether he can use
tables,
>and if so do they have to be configured in any specific way?  Any
information
>will be appreciated.  You can reply directly to NFML at aol.com if you wish.

This question usually boils down to what Lynx can handle, although a number
of institutions are experimenting with the WebSpeak web reader.  If it's an
issue in your organization, there's no excuse for running versions of Lynx
prior to 2.5 (the current version is 2.7.1); if your sysadmin is still
running 2.3 or 2.4.2, tell him to get off his duff for half an hour and
upgrade: <URL:ftp://www.slcc.edu/pub/lynx/current>.  Recent versions do a
reasonable job of presenting tables that present actual tabular content. 
It doesn't actually parse the table, but it performs some semi-intelligent
tricks like putting spaces before new table cells and line breaks before
new rows.  If your pages rely on table hacks to attempt page formatting,
Lynx may not provide the results you'd like.

In general, my observation is that Lynx suffers much more from people
declining to use ALT attributes in IMG and AREA tags and VALUE attributes
in INPUT TYPE=IMAGE tags (Lynx 2.7 will also understand an ALT tag there,
though it isn't valid HTML).  We have a number of database interfaces that
are completely unusable in Lynx because of the INPUT TYPE=IMAGE problem;
the unfortunate thing is that almost none of our vendors is using INPUT
TYPE=IMAGE as an actual image map, but just as a fancy submit button.  

Thomas Dowling
OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu