Adobe

[Don Ellis]

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 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 1/5/07, Jonathan Hutchins <hutchins at 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.
> > _______________________________________________
> > Kclug mailing list
> > Kclug at kclug.org
> > http://kclug.org/mailman/listinfo/kclug
> >
>
> Funny you should bring this up.
> 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?
>
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