[imp] imp 3.0 - unnecessary javascript dependencies

[Marcus I. Ryan]

The other question I always ask and never have answered is what browser
and speech software are these users using?  With the proper speech
software (Jaws, for one), IE is quite usable by blind users.

I won't promise time frames, etc., but I will note that my mother is
blind, and will eventually try to use my Horde/IMP setup.  When that
happens I may start working on code fixes so she can work with it
comfortably, but she uses IE and has javascript enabled, so I will not
be working on removing javascript, unless it's absolutely 100%
necessary; I will be working on making displays more readable.  Anything
she can use with IE and Jaws I will ignore.

On a personal note, I have to admit my mom and I are spoiled as far as
computing needs go; Iowa is the best place in the world to be blind. 
The technology support, among other services, from the Iowa Department
for the Blind is phenominal.  Because of that she has much of the latest
technology for the blind, making it hard to relate to people using far
outdated technology.  

As long as all images have ALT tags, which is required by xhtml anyway,
and we don't use a lot of graphical tricks to "pretty things up" modern
speech software and IE should work fine, javascript and all.

Quoting Jon Parise <jon@horde.org>:

> On Wed, Apr 17, 2002 at 09:00:46AM -0400, Scott Kearney wrote:
> 
> > Is there any reason why there is so much javascript used in Imp? We
> are 
> > trying to make Imp as accessible as possible to people with 
> > disability-friendly web browsers (e.g. for the blind), and have
> noticed 
> > many cases where there will be a form button that instead of
> actually 
> > being a TYPE=SUBMIT button, it will be a generic button, which
> submits 
> > through a javascript action. Is there any reason that this and many
> 
> > other things could not be changed to the scriptless HTML
> equivalents?
> 
> We've accepted JavaScript as a necessary evil in order to present a
> clean and friendly user interface.  We're open to non-JavaScript
> alternatives where the functionality can gracefully degrade when
> JavaScript is not available.
> 
> A lot of people have raised this issue in the past, but none of
> them
> have contributed ideas (or, more importantly, code) to change the
> current state of things.
> 
> At the moment, there's little motivation for we, the developers, to
> invest time to finding these alternatives ourselves.
> 
> As a side note, I personally think that users constrained to using
> a
> text-based interface use a non-web-based solution for reading their
> mail (i.e. a text-based mail client).
> 
> -- 
> Jon Parise (jon@csh.rit.edu)  .  Information Technology (2001)
> http://www.csh.rit.edu/~jon/  :  Computer Science House Member
> 
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-- 
Marcus I. Ryan, marcus@riboflavin.net
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