XSL and accessibility challenge

[Paul Prescod <papresco@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I believe that the Web has been a big step forward in accessibility.
Without much extra effort, one can make a web page that can be "heard"
by the visually impaired and read over a 2400 baud modem over a
(relatively!) low cost satellite link in the remote reaches of
civilization.

My challenge is that XSL should continue this tradition. It should not
make it harder to make accesible web pages. It should not require a
special, separate stylesheet for decent text/text->speech rendering,
though it should *allow* an optimized text-centric stylesheet.

I think that one way to promote this form of easy accesibility is to
consider carefully the set of base flow objects and make them roughly
equivalent to the semantics in HTML. It would be the attributes on those
objects that would make them visually beautiful. In other words, we
would propogate the basic HTML/CSS idea in the *output* of the XSL
renderer.

 Paul Prescod
--
http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco

Art is always at peril in universities, where there are so many people, 
young and old, who love art less than argument, and dote upon a text 
that provides the nutritious pemmican on which scholars love to chew. 
				-- Robertson Davies in "The Cunning Man"



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