I don't think there was anything malicious in what Stan was saying, he was just pointing out that screen readers rely on us humans putting pages together correctly.
If you haven't any experience of one the best thing might be to download IBM's HomePage Reader, there's a free trial on their site somewhere and it's really strange to have one read out your site to you!
But your point about putting standards in place to make CSS work is misunderstanding the point. CSS and XHTML are the standards, the problem is that browser makers are still catching up.
The W3C have developed standards for how CSS should be rendered, but most browsers still differ in how much of these standards they choose to implement. But on the positive side, Firefox implements standards well, and IE6 is a massive improvement on IE5, so there is hope!
Alex,
I don't think there was anything malicious in what Stan was saying, he was just pointing out that screen readers rely on us humans putting pages together correctly.
If you haven't any experience of one the best thing might be to download IBM's HomePage Reader, there's a free trial on their site somewhere and it's really strange to have one read out your site to you!
But your point about putting standards in place to make CSS work is misunderstanding the point. CSS and XHTML are the standards, the problem is that browser makers are still catching up.
The W3C have developed standards for how CSS should be rendered, but most browsers still differ in how much of these standards they choose to implement. But on the positive side, Firefox implements standards well, and IE6 is a massive improvement on IE5, so there is hope!