[ossrp-control] Standards, interfaces and css.

All,

The thread on the concept of interface modality has been interesting, and it has led me off on a slight tangent, hence the new thread.

I'd like to suggest that the screen reader supports standards in web coding more fully than other existing assistive technologies. Specifically css, and the braille, emboss and speech stylesheets.

To give a little background, css is capable of using multiple stylesheets to control the way a web site is presented. Each different stylesheet can be used to control the whole web site, or just a single part. They can also be targeted to control presentation that is specific to a certain kind of external technology. For example:

*Screen stylesheets, control the onscreen presentation as seen on the monitor.
*Print stylesheets, control the presentation when a page is printed.


Both of the above stylesheets could be used on the same page. When the page is viewed onscreen, it would be there in all its glory. But when the same page was printed, the print stylesheet could be used to strip out elements such as page navigation, that are both unnescessary and unwieldy when printing out a web page.

Returning to the subject of braille, emboss and speech stylesheets, much the same thing can be achieved. A web page can be presented in a format most suitable for a person using audio or tactile output. The problem is that support for such stylesheets is practically non existent. With the exception of one of the Linux text browsers, none of these assistive stylesheets is supported by either browser or screen reader technologies, with each faction stubbornly maintaining that it should be the responsibility of the other.

If this screen reader can break that stand off, and begin supporting these technologies, it would not only garner considerable interest from the WAI/W3C, but more importantly would open up a new route for web developers to support users of assistive technologies *and users of all technologies, with equal facility.

Tink.
--
http://www.tink.co.uk/ 

To post to the list, send a message to:
ossrp-control@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
To unsubscribe, send a message to:
ossrp-control-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
and set the subject field of the message to "unsubscribe" (without the quotes

Other related posts: