Project Log: Homepage compliance with disability accessbility

	Project Log : Solutions : Homepage compliance with disability accessbility
	In meetings past, Mark Cesare had expressed concerns regarding the accessibility of the Cline Library homepage. JavaScripts animating menus were inaccessible, and some elements disappeared altogether. The column-oriented visual format of the page was not reflected by the underlying HTML, so that readers would read across the columns instead of down them. Enter Betsie. Betsie is a Perl script written by Wayne Myers of the BBC which parses web pages to remove frames, tables, images and imagemaps, complex formatting and scripts, reformatting the output as large print text (user configurable). Links followed through Betsie are likewise Betsified with varying degrees of success (CNN homepage passes, BTW). Revision of the homepage consisted of collapsing rows and embedding 1-column tables into the row's cells. Visually indistinguishable. JavaScript-based "jump" menus replaced with regular HTML menus with submit buttons. Image redundancy hand-pared to instead reuse identical images across page, eliminating ~10 downloads. Approach met with general approval from Claudia and Cynthia, as well as approval from Brian for taking the initiative on this project.
	10.11.00: Betsie is reasonably stable. Unfortunately the methods which our database require for authenticated access are a bit too much for Betsie and she gags on URLs which reference unorthodox ports and pass other arguments to other CGIs. Still looking into this.
	http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/betsie/
	2004: The complete redo of the core website was accomplished with XHTML/CSS in order to make accessibility a non-issue. In particular, I managed moving navigation links to the end of site pages, while visually retaining the left navbar orientation currently in vogue. Betsie was an interesting idea for its time, but our experience was that it gagged on slow loading resources like licensed databases. Proxy filters are a lousy solution for accessibility.
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