No, you're not overstating it. My Web design books, dating back to the mid to late '90s have been saying essentially the same thing. There are published standards encouraging designers to make sites accessible to people using text browsers and such conditions as color blindness. i was dismayed when I first went to the Grameen Bank website several years ago and had to wait an incredibly long time for their graphics only page to load on my dial-up line. They are an organization dedicated to making micro-credit loans to customers too small for other banks to consider, but browsing their website required a broadband connection to view, and was not accessible without the ability to actually see images. Not to standard.
Fortunately, they have substantially improved their sites,
http://www.grameenfoundation.org/?gclid=CKa48NT1yokCFRUhNAodYWS5wA
and
http://www.grameen-info.org/bank/
I even viewed the site with the colorblind filters at
http://colorfilter.wickline.org/
and the sites are "not too bad" for colorblind people.
Testing tools for page designers can help evaluate whether a page is generally usable:
http://aware.hwg.org/sites/
Yes, I appreciate nice photos or other large art pieces on a page, and it's nice to be able to watch videos online. But I don't know why it is that I was able to watch videos and get sound streams several years ago with much less advanced equipment, but requirements to meet basic capabilities have increased tremendously.
No, I don't think you're overstating it.
--Don Ellis
On 1/5/07, Oren Beck <orenbeck@gmail.com
> wrote:
On 1/5/07, Jonathan Hutchins <hutchins@tarcanfel.org> wrote:
Somebody on the IRC channel ("Alter-Ego") said that adobe products allow
average users to create great web sites. I disagree. I think that they
allow people who would have created great web sites without adobe do do
things a bit differently. People who would have created lousy web sites
without adobe will still create lousy web sites - they'll just have a
meaningless animated splash page on them.
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I just today was using a new install of Firefox lacking all the "plugins". The experience of so many websites being essentially unusable unless one has the "eye candy" turned on and plugins downloaded is depressing. It blocks the handicapped folks using screen readers. It just plain smells of a society that has become so Attention Span Deficient that "if it don't flash they won't look at it"
Or am I understating it?