accessibility and Accessibility

My head is already spinning from the whole accessibility debate. Some people are quarreling over whether to take the W3C validator as gospel, while others argue about whether PDF is accessible. I personally don't care which format the rules for building accessible websites come in. I do wish some web developers would finally get their act together.

At first I had no intention of weighing in on accessibility, but yesterday's experience finally changed my mind. For quite a while Bobina Kadrnožková had been telling me she simply couldn't open the Idnes news site, and saying something about an unsafe ActiveX object.

After a ten-minute monologue about computer security in the context of Internet Explorer and ActiveX, I explained to her that a single ActiveX object surely couldn't affect whether an entire page displayed. Last night and this morning I found out it can make all the difference.

The people who run Idnes don't give a damn about accessibility. How else can you explain that Internet Explorer, tested with version 5.0, won't open Idnes with ActiveX controls disabled?

Today I couldn't resist taking a look at the HTML. The odd jumble of tables didn't bother me much, but I really couldn't make sense of the XML prologue repeated seven times in different parts of the code.

I'm really glad there are rules for building accessible websites. There is also a “bunch of ignoramuses” who couldn't care less about accessibility!