Comments on: Its Your Blog So Do What You Want

By: steven

steven — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 21:04:18 +0000

I should also point out that I’m not advocating that it doesn’t matter. It does. But that its not my concern. I am not concerned as a standardista with what Johnny’s grandmother is doing in her Facebook.

Someone once in my wilder days asked me why I spent so much time trying to tread on ants (fighting nobodies) when I only needed to tread on the occasional somebody. There was a lot of wisdom in that. There will always be a zillion ants to chase.

By: steven

steven — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 20:34:02 +0000

Benjamin there are always going to be MySpacers, grandmothers, year 9 FrontPagers (figuratively speaking). And to be honest if you look at the thing that made the web successful its been the ability to easily hyperlink to each others pages with ease. It is actually unrealistic to expect that most of those people will ever care about accessibility, for example. Its not their fault either - we’re the techs who’ve chosen this field of interest.

99% of my friends only use the web for email and I’d say my clients have had the same measure of web literacy.

I’ve been a hardcore standardista for a number of years and have indeed embarrassed myself, looking back, whinging about someone elses blog not having alternate text. In a perfect world where everyone was me that would actually be achievable. But its never going to be that world.

So my article is really saying that the real focus - call it the first step - is commercial business, social services and government. Why? Because that’s where change has to happen for it to filter down.

Johnny’s grandmother doesn’t need to learn how to insert alternate text or how to avoid photosensitive epilepsy. Her tools should be guiding her for one but basically we have to accept not everyone is a geek. Not everyone will ever care.

The largest barrier - and this needs to be understood by standardistas and in fact everyone who works in IT - is that everyone else isn’t into IT. Sometimes we simply associate with too many of our own kind to realise that. We attribute our own knowledge and skills.

Yes for business and government you are right - fear of and apathy about is the reason. But your average blogger, say for a knitting site or the teddy bear club, isn’t going to ever read WCAG X or understand DOCTYPES etc.

That’s actually our job even with a client. Do you see what I’m suggesting?

By: Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis

Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 19:14:00 +0000

As far as I can tell, a resource linked into the world wide web is more like a public space than a private household. You cannot assume that if a visitor comes “to your blog its for information and because” they’re “into the same world view”. First-time visitors are more likely to have simply followed a link. Failing to make your site fully accessible is one thing, but knowingly making it dangerous to unsuspecting visitors via flashing images that can trigger epilepsy seems morally irresponsible to me.

It’s not always practical for ordinary folk like Johnny’s grandmother to work out how to make their sites accessible (although in my experience spite towards, fear of, apathy about, and ignorance of people with disabilities are larger barriers than technophobia). But the ideal would be for web professionals and enthusiasts to create site-making software that helps ordinary folk create non-harmful, reasonably accessible sites with a minimum of effort. For example, a video upload tool could check and store flash rates; an embedded video player could warn about flash rates before allowing the end-user to play it.