On Sat, 27 Nov 2010, Patricia Shanahan wrote:
Tom Anderson wrote:
...
The usual responses to that are mobile browsers - where the more
basic phones still have very limited javascript support (eg my
dreadful 18-month-old Blackberry Curve, where you have to go into a
menu to enable javascript on each page you need it on, whereupon it
proceeds to reload the page) and screenreaders used by the visually
impaired.
Really, though, fallback is more about people with old browsers - you
may not need to fall back to a complete lack of javascript, but not
everyone has the latest features, so you should be able to do
something sensible if they don't. There's a whole field of polyfills,
shims, browser resets and so on to do this. As you said, mostly
encapsulated in standard libraries.
So what is the correct fix for the visually impaired dependent on
screen readers?
There's bound to be something in jQuery for them!
My personal opinion is that sites should work with just the HTML,
without any CSS or javascript, and use semantic markup, so that they are
universally accessible - to people with old browsers, mobile phones,
screenreaders, text-mode browsers, web-to-ham-radio gateways, or
whatever. All the other stuff should build on top of that to create a
happy fun time experience for people with capable browsers, but should
never be essential. I think this is not only a humane policy, but one
that leads to good engineering, because it puts the fundamentals of the
system in the fundamental layer.
The trouble is that the business and the javascript fanboys (jCrazies?),
IME, don't see it that way. If it works in IE6 and upwards, then that's
good enough for them, and if building a page so that it falls back all
the way means dispensing with the latest jQuery gizmo, or it taking more
skill or effort to implement, then they aren't interested.
But for GMail, Google Maps, Google Docs etc. then usability