[dokuwiki] Re: barrier free website with dokuwiki as CMS?
- From: Sander Tekelenburg <tekelenb@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: dokuwiki@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2009 13:50:00 +0100
At 09:18 +0100 UTC, on 2009-03-12, Andreas Benzler wrote:
[...]
Out of the box Dokuwiki does a reasonably good job of generating 'accessible'
web pages. Probably better than most. But, as with any web publishing system,
you will still have to know what you're doing. Even Dokuwiki allows you to
use tables for non-tabular data...
> What I mean is that a website has to be accessible by eg. blind people.
> Therefore a text version of the site is needed
No. Providing a separate version for blind users (or some other audience) is
a horrible 'solution'. It just displays a complete lack of understanding what
the Web is.
> [...] which
> can be used to feed a voice output system or a some Braille reading
> device, (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braille)
More importantly, see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_Reader>.
However, note that the majority of blind users are, for different reasons,
'forced' to use one particular screen reader, JAWS, which is abolutely
horrible, buggy, ill-designed, ill-configured by default, and not even its
own settings are accessible. (Part of the problem is that it relies in Win IE
to do the HTML parsing for it, although I believe recent versions have some
level of support for Firefox.)
So there is the theory of how to author websites that are accessible to
everyone: basically just use proper markup and ensure that nothing is
dependant on images, javascript, css, etc. And there's the reality of the
tools that people use...
Additionally there's often a difference between how things are supposed to
work technically, and what legal requirements apply. You can find some
relevant sources on both subjects at <http://webrepair.org/sources>.
If you really want to dive into this subject, be warned that there is a
strong tendency for every single interest group to, not hindered by any
actual technical understanding, advocate solutions that benefit only and
specifically them. They all want you to add specific functionality, formats,
and even text strings to your website that, supposedly, help with that one
specific disability. (There are even 'specialists' who tell webpublishers to
not use certain HTML constructs that are especially useful to blind people,
simply because a bug in some version of JAWS makes it crash on that
construct.) No doubt they mean well, but their advise is generally best
ignored. Following one advise will often conflict with another.
--
Sander Tekelenburg, <http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/>
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