There was some controversy in the other thread about the potential impact of this Act on site design. I believe it will certainly expand the definition of "visitor friendly" sites, and that there is a very real potential for litigation at some point.

I'd be interested in others' opinions on this.

(Hi Diane, nice to find you here working this beat. )

[This message has been edited by Alan_Thompson (edited 06-21-2000).]

The first place they are likely to crop up is on corporate intranets, where usability would be critical for employment. But never rule out a big class action suit against a highly visible public website, done partly to bring the issue into general public awareness.

Still, I feel the greatest burden should be carried by the manufacturers of devices that adapt websites for the physically challenged.

I must admit that I cannot envision how this thing would work, and haven't yet found any articles explaining it. They all say that we must comply ... but comply how?

Does a special browser ... read alt tags aloud? What (other) disabilities are we talking about here?

World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/
(Guess that page will take a couple of days to read.)

Disabilities Rights Office http://www.fcc.gov/cib/dro/section255.html

To test pages: http://www.cast.org/bobby/

The recommendations include using largely unsupported tags: THEAD, TBODY, TFOOTER, and stylesheets instead of tables for layout. Last time I checked, only ONE browser fully supported css, and none of them did anything comprehensible with the THEAD, et al nonsense.

The one I liked best was the suggestion that we all revert to writing at the grade 5 level, because current speech simulators can't understand complex sentences. Neither can they understand embedded subjects, subject predicate inversion, qualifiers, or modifiers. You know -- the things that everyone uses in everyday speech and writing.

About the only thing in the whole document that made any sense, was the suggestion to use a spell checker.

Aware.org's Common Myths About Web Accessibility

[This message has been edited by DianeV (edited 06-26-2000).]

(Daring to ask Lynne a question) --
"Neither can they understand embedded subjects, subject predicate inversion, qualifiers, or modifiers ..."

If I get you right, you can't use any adverbs or adjectives (which should make for the world's longest sentences) or ... poetic styles where the verb comes before the subject?

The compatibility documents also lay out a series of instructions for making lists and nested lists comprehensible to speech simulators. These are pretty straight forward, but your pages with simple or nested lists are going to end up looking like legal documents -- which may or may not comply with your design concept for the page.

My question is: Has so little advanced in the past years that trying to change the english language is easier than programming some better software?

And if everyone does comply to their standards, then what happens to development? If all the sites comply, then there is no need for improvement.

Personally, I think I will give the programmers a challenge and stick to my current text.