Actually, special treatment or at least special awareness is needed to
design certain parts of pages so speech synthesizers and screen readers can
read them.  Examples include tables and of course alt tags though not
special treatment as such are often overlooked by people using pictures.
By the way, alt tags have an advantage even for picture users.  Those who
wish to access a page rapidly sometimes turn off graphics and thus like alt
tags even if they can see.  An even greater advantage of such tags is they
can be made keys ina a search and thus can be accessed when using a search
engine.

At 07:56 AM 3/2/99 , you wrote:
>I can't agree with this idea that web page speech packages should do more
>to make the pages usable.  The blame rightly belongs on the page
>designers, because if the page is designed properly, there is little or no
>need to make special considerations for the screen readers.  That is the
>point.  While a speech program certainly Can make it easier to view a web
>page, the point is, it shouldn't have to.   With properly designed pages,
>special treatment is not necessary.  Period.  This idea that the speech
>synthesizer should handle mal programmed pages is silly.
>
>
>VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
>To join or leave the list, send a message to
>[log in to unmask]  In the body of the message, simply type
>"subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations.
> VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at
>http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html


VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
To join or leave the list, send a message to
[log in to unmask]  In the body of the message, simply type
"subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations.
 VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html