[Web4lib] Gracefully degrades to..?

[Deborah Kaplan]

On Wed, 24 May 2006, Hankinson, Andrew wrote:

> Until you are blind or otherwise sight impaired and need to use a
> specialized stylesheet or screen-reader, you likely would not see the
> appeal of using CSS for layout and HTML for marking up content.
> However, for public libraries especially, maintaining an accessible
> website for all walks of life should be a top priority.

Thanks for saying this. It's not just vision-impaired people who
benefit from CSS layout. I'm a mobility impaired user -- and
designer! -- and CSS has made so many web sites usable to me that
never used to be. Far more people than you would think require
some kind of accessibility tools to use the Web, and CSS takes
all of those prettifying layout issues and removes them from the
logical page construction so that my accessibility tools (Dragon
NaturallySpeaking and either Opera or Firefox with mouseless
browsing turned on) can navigate the page properly. If you use
tables for layout, it's extremely likely to break accessibility
enhancements.

Not to mention all the other things people have said about
increased portability and flexibility.

(using CSS for design will also make your life much easier when
you have to port your library web site to run on a mobile or
other unusual device. Separating content from layout is almost
always a good principle.)

-Deborah