Eric Should the ultimate fallback in degradement be plain text?

Martijn Are we talking the web or in general? Text is surely not the most universal or accessible system for everything in real life. I seem to recall a story about a parking garage using the silhouettes of fruits in different colours to mark what floor you were on. For people with problems to remember numbers or read other information there was a fallback to a shape (e.g. banana) and if the shape made no sense to you there was a colour (e.g. yellow).