The protocols and languages of the Web were designed from the beginning to be adaptable to a wide variety of special needs. HTML, for instance, was designed to express the logical structure of a document rather than its specific presentation, leaving the details of how to present it up to the user. This allows a properly marked-up HTML document to be presented on media as diverse as a high-end graphical workstation, a portable PalmPilot, a WebTV set-top box, or a speaking text browser for the blind. Full lists of sports scores and stock prices can be presented in text as large as the reader wishes, since there's no fixed page size or page count as with a paper publication, and browsers have a control to let the user change the font size if the original value isn't large enough.
Designers have to work hard to defeat this adaptability. They do it by contorting the markup structure to achieve visual effects, by attempting to force font sizes, line widths, and line break positions, by using text and navigational buttons in the form of graphics with no alternative text, and by creating navigation controls that require less-accessible features like Java, JavaScript, and Shockwave.
With a little bit of thought, the fancy features can be built in ways that degrade gracefully for browsers that don't support them. Such things also improve a site's position in search engines, which have as much trouble indexing a multimedia-heavy site as a handicapped person has reading and navigating it.
Incidentally, the online version of Powell's column in Reason Online comes out pretty well on text and speaking browsers (with some very minor quibbles). So your own site designers practice accessibility while publishing columns that criticize the concept.
Daniel Tobias
Shreveport, LA
dan@softdisk.com
Adam Clayton Powell III replies: Daniel Tobias is correct, in my opinion, when he states that using simpler and more accessible sites is thoughtful and almost always good business.
On the Freedom Forum site, for example, we have banished Java and other animated effects because they make the site slower and more difficult to use for those with slow dial-up connections. But it will only promote innovation and progress for all, including for the disabled, if Web designers are free to innovate, even to contort the markup structure, choosing to pay the price of reduced market share or thoughtfulness.
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