Chaz Boston Baden,
smofsweb@bostonbaden.com
Rev. 06-Apr-1997
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Content is King
"One comment about being kind to low-end users -- keep in mind that for
everyone, not just low-end users, the content is the main reason for
accessing the Web page, not for people to be impressed with how many
little pieces of art you can find to cram on the page, or what cool
background art you can find. It's possible to have a nice,
clean-looking, well organized Web page without a lot of art.
"This is especially crucial for pages like those for a Worldcon or
popular regional, where people are probably going to access the
pages several times before the convention. You don't want to
frustrate them each time by having the pages take forever to
load, or by having lots of icons whose meaning they have to
decipher every time."
(Janice Gelb)
Text Browsers and Accessibility
"There is one category of net.fogey which should not be ignored: the
diehard Lynx fan. The key advantage that comes with the little bit of
extra work needed to make your page look OK in text-based Lynx is that it
automagically is more handicap accessible (for text-to-audio interfaces,
etc. No one who uses one of these interfaces wants to hear IMAGE every
time you do fancy formatting with a transparent pixel shim.) That's why I
wholeheartedly endorse the use of Lynx-View at
http://www.miranova.com/~steve/Lynx-View.html
and the efforts of the CPB/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media at
http://www.boston.com/wgbh/ncam/."
(Earl Cooley III)
"I think it is VERY important to have a Lynx version of a
page.... the two library systems I know that have Internet access
available to the 'off the street crowd' (Minneapolis and Milwaukee) both
only have Lynx available."
(Joyce Scrivner)
"Another argument for Lynx awareness is on the ISP I use, the
Columbus Freenet. It, and other freenets, provide (very low cost to free)
connections to the internet for home PCs but only support Lynx for WWW
use. And the $25.00 a year I pay for this is a lot better than the $19.00
and up a month most commercial ISPs charge."
(Mark Evans)
Frames and JavaScript
"I could not agree more about assuring a Lynx version of a page,
especialy inclusion of alt tags for all graphics and alternate navigation
for image maps. However, I would take this a slight step farther and do
on several of my sites. Using JavaScript and/or
<NOFRAMES></NOFRAMES> I redirect viewers of my page to pages
appropriate for their browser. Using this method, I am able to give a
page tailored for Lynx or one for those with frames or, more recently,
ones with ActiveX Controls, VBScript and viewable only from Internet
Explorer 3.0. This entails a little more work in that several versions of
the same page are necessary, but I've found it interesting and doable. It
also means that 89a gif animations which are somewhat annoying in Netscape
2.0 as they reload and reload and reload and a joy in Netscape 3.0 ;-) can
be differentially viewed or not viewed depending on the browser."
(Jack Beslanwitch)
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