Text-only is not accessible

By karlgroves On December 28, 2011

Not long ago I participated in a discussion on a W3C mailing list where a participant on the list contended that a site is not accessible because it did not work right in Lynx. Lynx, for those who don’t know, is a text-based web browser – in other words, it offers no support for graphics, video, or JavaScript. There was a time, years ago, when a site working in Lynx was the litmus test for accessibility. If it worked in Lynx, the argument went, it would work in assistive technologies like screen readers. That was before the proliferation of Accessibility APIs, before screen readers used Document Object Model rendering, and before ARIA. These days, people who still view “working in Lynx” as a viable measure of a site’s accessibility are demonstrating their ignorance of assistive technologies, ignorance of the realities of modern web sites and applications and, frankly, ignorance of accessibility. Further, it is indicative of the myopic view that permeates the topic of accessibility that assumes the only people to be concerned about in discussions of web accessibility are blind people.

Read more at
http://www.karlgroves.com/2011/12/28/text-only-is-not-accessible/