[andybak]

God, yes. So much of what's repeated about the benefits of semantic markup are pie-in-the-sky.

The link to the IRC logs in that piece was fascinating. To see Mark Pilgrim - who was always at the pragmatic end of things when it came to the accessibility debate - recanting many of the positions he takes in 'Dive into Accessibility' tells you how little of the things that we've been promised for years have actually amounted to anything.

Don't believe anyone who tells you anything about markup best practice until they can point you to a shipping user-agent that will make use of it and introduce you to a living human being who will experience some tangible benefit.

[ricardobeat]

God, no. Please don't help to spread this horseshit.

Here are the user agents that make use of it:

- ChromeVox: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kgejglhpjiefppelpm...

- NVDA: http://www.nvda-project.org/

- Window-Eyes: http://www.gwmicro.com/window-eyes/

- VoiceOver: http://www.apple.com/accessibility/voiceover/

- JAWS: http://www.freedomscientific.com/products/fs/jaws-product-pa...

- Orca: http://live.gnome.org/Orca/

And two dozen others. And here a few living human beings that benefit from it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mwoe7OjIxpw, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pntGp00HHr8, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAw0SIkXm1o, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBzSXIEusoU, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zSTJwIULYU, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_TFHqIHBqM

285 million people are visually impaired in the world. Putting aside the SEO, meta-data and other discussions, I think this is a pretty meaningful argument in favor of doing it right.

[andybak]

You (and I to a certain extent) need to be more specific. You've provided a list of screen readers. What I was really trying to say was "when someone argues that a particular markup or technique has benefits, then they need to demonstrate a real user with a real need who will benefit using shipping technology".

So we would need to pick a particular point of contention and then we can argue the toss.

[andybak]

PS If you read the Mark Pilgrim IRC logs he caricatured the response he often found when criticising any aspect of accessibility best-practise as "OMG!!! YOU HATE BLIND PEOPLE!!!". It's an effective way of shutting down debate and doesn't help anyone.

[icebraining]

until they can point you to a shipping user-agent that will make use of it

Chicken and egg can be a problem. Someone could very well be saying "there's no point in developing a browser which can understand semantically structured data since almost no website implements it".

[yuhong]

Yea, the sad thing is that, for example, back in the day Viola had built-in support for collapsible lists:

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.html/msg/ddc97911c2f9a6f4

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.infosystems.www.authorin...

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.infosystems.www.authorin...