Steve Grobschmidt's List: joeclark

• Retrofitting always costs more
• Retrofitting always costs more, even at the level of adding a dimmer switch in your house
• Automatic doors; sign-language interpreters; adaptive technology; attendant services; wheelchair-accessible housing, buses, and trains – they all cost money
• However, the graduated approach provided by this book makes access inexpensive, or at least reasonable in cost, for small, medium, and large Web projects
• If 1% of your audience can’t see graphics, and all of a sudden your site becomes popular and moves from 20,000 hits a month to two million, does the change from 200 to 20,000 affected users influence your opinion that “too few people” might benefit?
• The American Foundation for the Blind estimates there are 900,000 visually-impaired computer users in the U.S.
• 43% of U.S. adults with disabilities surveyed use the Internet and spend, on average, twice as long online as nondisabled adults.
• • 21.1% of people with “vision problems” have Internet access (1,542,410 people)
   
  • 27.2% of people with “hearing problems” (1,893,392)
   
  • 22.5% of people with “difficulty using hands” (1,411,200)
   
  • 42.2% of people with a learning disability (1,242,790)
• You’re doing it because, deep down, you accept that the Web is attractive to people who aren’t exactly like you.
• 10.4% of people with disabilities whose family incomes are less than $25,000 have Internet access
• • 23.8% with incomes of $25,000 to $49,999 (nondisabled: 35.0%)
   
  • 34.2% with incomes of $50,000 to $74,999 (nondisabled: 49.6%)
   
  • 51.3% with incomes $75,000 and above (nondisabled: 62.0%)
• History is replete with insults applied to categories of people.
• Simply put, an entity is not required to provide accommodation if that provision would materially endanger the entity or alter its fundamental purpose.
• While there are limited exceptions to legal requirements, there is no blanket exemption.
• It’s a form of beneficial redundancy
• A Website built according to accessibility principles – better yet, a Website that conforms to published specifications like the Web Accessibility Initiative’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines or U.S. government Section 508 requirements – has greater value than an inaccessible site.
• Absolute standards compliance
• “write once, read anywhere.”
• “anywhere” really means “anywhere,” including a screen reader, a printout, a Braille display, or a text-only variation
• Standards compliance is a form of programming maturity

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• Deaf, hard-of-hearing, hearing-impaired

  • Deaf - usage of 'Net
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• Blind, visually-impaired, low-vision

  • Blind - usage of Net
• Keyboard guards and overlays
• Slow keys and onscreen keyboards
• Replacement mice
• Switches and scanning software
• If you the Website visitor are using particularly primitive adaptive technology
• you may be stuck pressing the Tab key repeatedly to move from link to link, from link to image, from field to image, and every other combination within a Web page.
• Well, if you have a relatively modest visual impairment, all you may need is screen magnification.
• Many visually-impaired people find dark text on a brilliant white background unbearable.
• If you’re blind enough that you can’t really see a monitor, you need something called a screen reader
• there are programs that do nothing but provide voice output for Web browsers to the exclusion of all other software on a computer, like IBM Home Page Reader and pwWebSpeak
• One crucial fact to understand about screen readers, though: They’re run from the keyboard
• Another curious factoid: Some totally-blind people don’t bother installing a monitor at all. (Computers can often run “headless.”)
• Braille display: Nylon or metal pins controlled by software protrude upward through a grid, forming the cells used in Braille writing
• Without a doubt the most neglected disability group online, and, not coincidentally, the very hardest to accommodate, learning-disabled Web surfers face frustrating barriers.

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• Additionally, longdescription of still images on the Web is cognate with the practice of audio description of film and video.

• Quite bluntly, none of us should be made to suffer for the longtime failure of browser makers to conform to W3C standards.
• You have no way of predicting the conditions under which your site is viewed.
• You have never had absolute control over the appearance of your pages.
• You have no hope of dictating the pixel-level appearance of your page
• Designers and developers do not bear sole responsibility for accessibility; the site visitor must come to the table with something resembling functional equipment
• Frankly, it causes less harm to sentence users of nonstandard equipment to nonstandard Web experiences than to hold back the adoption of standards that benefit everyone else, including the disabled
• What about “old” browsers like Lynx?
• Other text-only or “console” browsers are WannaBe, Links, and W3M.
• An accessible HTML page remains accessible for these browsers.
• But a certain code goes in front of all that, the DOCTYPE

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