Joe Clark — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 09:43:26 GMT

I wish that well-meaning people would stop proposing that links (and headings) be understandable when pulled out of context. They aren’t out of context in HTML documents, which are based on a document tree. It may be a fun party trick for some application or other to list links or headings, but that says nothing about the actual organization of the document. Links in particular are inline elements and authors have not only a reasonable expectation but an *airtight* expectation that people will read and understand the context of those elements. This article would itself fail such a test.

I wouldn’t use anything “automated” to do with captioning. Computers can’t caption, and nobody should delude themselves otherwise.

I would be very surprised to find a CMS that can convert *from* PDF to RTF (a largely undocumented format) to XML (which browsers mostly cannot display and no person with a disability actually wants). To do that properly, the PDF would have to be tagged in the first place. PDF tags *are* XML.

Rather more importantly, the article gets the basic fact wrong: Accessibility is a precursor to usability, not the other way around. An inaccessible site is not usable for the simple reason that people with disabilities cannot *use* it. Unless of course those aren’t really the people we’re developing for.

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Joe Clark