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Re:Whitehouse.gov Has A New Face by sh1mmer on Tuesday January 20, 2009 @10:42PM (#442753)
I'm going to disagree. Let me share some background, I spent several years helping to write the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 spec. The original WCAG 1.0 as well as Section 508 specify an alternate text only site as a viable method.

Real world experience shows us those sites quickly fall behind. Text-alternatives are necessary for multimedia content, text-only sites as an alternative to good markup aren't.

Re:Whitehouse.gov Has A New Face by bmelton on Wednesday January 21, 2009 @01:39PM (#443587)
Fall behind in what sense? Obviously, if the multimedia content isn't transcribed quickly enough, then that makes sense, but I would also guess less consequential than if a given page weren't transformed from 'marked up' to 'text', but in the latter case, if the backend is dynamic, and just changing the output format, why would it fall behind?
Re:Whitehouse.gov Has A New Face by sh1mmer on Wednesday January 21, 2009 @03:48PM (#443776)
People just don't want to maintain 2 sites. Extra features and sections often don't get updated to the text only rendering.

I guess my point is that screen readers like (even prefer) well written markup. A text-only site is a kickback from when they couldn't and the accessibility guidelines were written to deal with that.