Comments on: Amazon.com to enhance its accessibility

By: Darek

Darek — Mon, 14 May 2007 13:57:13 +0000

Sorry, of course the discussion is about Amazon.com to enhance its
web accessibility to the blind people and not about HTML. I think
that Amazon.com is doing the right thing and will accomplish its
goal. And I hope that it will have many followers.
Regards

By: Severin Kurpiers

Severin Kurpiers — Mon, 14 May 2007 12:19:20 +0000

This is a very interesting news and the results of this project seem to be of a great importance. I guess that many others will watch closely the efforts of Amazon.com and will consider them in making their own decisions about enhancing the web accessibility to people with disabilities.

By: Darek

Darek — Mon, 14 May 2007 11:08:20 +0000

HTML is not about semantics. HTML is layout-markup, not semantic markup.

By: börsenspiel

börsenspiel — Mon, 07 May 2007 22:27:14 +0000

I’m sure you understood what Bruce was trying to convey by his use of the term “semantic HTML”. What a pity though that you ignored the good news that Amazon is engaging with the NFB.

By: Jim

Jim — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 08:49:39 +0000

Your use of emphasis is semantic proof that you are a horse’s ass

Appearing on a tee-shirt near you soon.

By: Asbjørn Ulsberg

Asbjørn Ulsberg — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 07:01:36 +0000

I’ll also reserve my cheer and applause until after I’ve seen the result. I’ll say I’m positive to read about the change of winds and that they acknowledge the fact that accessibility is important, but it does not seem like they’ve fully and truly “got it” yet. Perhaps they have and that the press release doesn’t reflect it appropriately; that is often the case when technical mumbo jumbo is supposed to be explained in layman terms. Let’s hope that’s the case here as well!

By: Avasilcai Daniel

Avasilcai Daniel — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 19:57:00 +0000

That will be something.
I don’t get it, they are big, ok but if there are accessibility problems they lose a lot of important clients. Maybe a person with disablity problem coud buy 1000% more then me as a normal person, so why they are not interesting in making websites accessible & usable. Who knows, maybe there ata the top level, is a manager wich have no ideea about how the web sites are build, maybe he use only IE 5 or 6 an have high internet conection because he can afford… Anyway, Amazon is only one big exemple, there are more in this situation.

By: Robert Wellock

Robert Wellock — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 14:07:50 +0000

Well, I’ll wait and see what they manage to achieve talk is good but doing is better.

By: Mike Cherim

Mike Cherim — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 19:41:02 +0000

I’ll reserve my cheer for after the fact. If they go through the site and add “Spacer Gif” as alt text to the alt attributes of table layout images I won’t be surprised nor will I be impressed. I say this because I see this sort of thing a lot. Some large site makes a so-called effort to make their site accessible only to see they’ve added alt=”Logo” and what not to the various images. They go through the motions, but yet they seem to be clueless as to what’s really needed from the disabled user’s perspective.

I do echo the sentiment that this effort should include all users, not just provisions for the blind, but if they do well for blind users, they will inherently make the site better for others. For now I’ll wait and see.

On the optimistic side, if they do a good job and make informed decisions, they may very well pave the way for others. Thus, let’s hope they do it right.

By: Dan

Dan — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 17:24:06 +0000

Apologies, apologies. The “Alcohol lock” on my keyboard is playing up again.

Peter Pan – of course HTML is not a semantic language in itself, but it does add semantic context to the language it is conveying to the user, especially when that user cannot see the rendered output. Even the address element aids such users in understanding what the author is trying to convey, despite its obvious and well-documented shortcomings.

I’m sure you understood what Bruce was trying to convey by his use of the term “semantic HTML”. What a pity though that you ignored the good news that Amazon is engaging with the NFB.

My regards to Tinkerbell.