

Re: [media] WAI guidelines yield the highest probability of true Web access

From: David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2000 22:27:31 +0100 (BST)
Message-Id: <200010252127.WAA16201@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
> 1. [top-left cell] Site Name / URL / Company Name
> 2. [top-right cell] High-Level Links
> 3. [bottom-left cell] Lower-Level Links
> 4. [bottom-right cell] Page Content
> This works very well in the screen reader I use for testing, IBM Home Page
> Reader.

In my view this is the wrong order.  The best order is generally
1, 4, 2, 3.  That means that you can get to the meat of the article
quickly.  More important for the authors, it means that search engines
include something sensible from the text as the summary in the search
results.  Not all search engines use meta elements.

In normal textual academic papers, it is usual to include the references
at the end, not start with them (commercial documents rarely have

> >5. Create tables that transform gracefully. Tables for layout equals NO-NO.

I thought that tables were reccommended as the best pragmatic approach
to layout, or is this a newer draft than I've read.  Table tables can
degrade gracefully if you include redundant <p>'s, spaces, etc.  If you
accept my reading order, you can make tables used for layout degrade
gracefully by tricks with col and rowspan.
Received on Thursday, 26 October 2000 02:49:05 GMT
