[sf-lug] Web site design (and creeping commercial interest/bias)

[Daniel Gimpelevich]

On Wed, 2015-02-25 at 18:39 -0800, Rick Moen wrote:
> I'm intrigued by the prospect of Web-design discussions being
> non-verbal, i.e., not in words.  Are we talking interpretive dance?
> Sculpture?  ASL?

Interesting that you bring that up, since for most people, the web today
is a visual medium, rather than just words as it initially was, when
Gopher was the standard. For visually impaired people, ALT tags made the
web usable, but what is the equivalent on a web where most pages are
generated by JavaScript and/or Flash? I went to the SCaLE sessions on
accessibility this year, and something that stuck with me was the point
that government agencies are required by law to have their websites
accessible to the blind, yet contractors routinely re-implement them in
inaccessible ways because they fail to see why they were implemented the
way they were before, and then staff have to go back and undo everything
the contractors did.