Re: Aie it's HUGE

All,

I have been saying this for about a year.  If you make it too complicated it
will not work.  Period.  So when pages are not accessible and you point
people to the guidelines, and they recoil, don t be surprised.

Sincerely,

Mike Burks
-----Original Message-----
From: Kynn Bartlett <kynn-hwg@idyllmtn.com>
To: Claude Sweet <sweetent@home.com>
Cc: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Date: Monday, December 07, 1998 11:18 PM
Subject: Re: Aie it's HUGE


>At 07:29 p.m. 12/07/98 -0800, Claude Sweet wrote:
>>Is it an acceptable or unacceptable excuse to state "we didn't intend
>>the guidelines as an educational endeavor, but only as establishing
>>accessibility guidelines? I guess the answer depends on how you apply
>>the excuse to other individuals whose sites and not accessible.
>
>Well, another problem is that it basically gives anyone an excuse
>for not following the current guidelines, at least, until E&O
>publishes more "accessible" (understandable) documents.
>
>I've watched the evolution of the Guidelines and things that
>preceeded them; at first, you had a list of about a dozen things
>that you should or shouldn't do.  It was incomplete by current
>standards, but gave you enough information that if you followed
>those short but complete rules, you'd do decently in improving
>the accessibility of your site.
>
>Things started to grow after that, and got sorted out by type of
>design you're doing (multimedia, tables, images, etc.), and now
>it's been reorganized again in several different ways.  Which is
>good, except the content has swelled, to over 50 printed pages
>as I stated before.
>
>Which makes for a good book, but things are so detailed and
>complex now that when you get something like the Quick Tips list,
>it's not going to do anything more than state "this is important"
>but not tell you how to do it.
>
>For example:
>
>"1. Images, Photographs & Animations
>Use the alt attribute to concisely describe the function of all visuals.
>"
>
>This is okay, except it basically assumes familiarity with what
>the "alt attribute" is, and how to use it.  In order to find that
>out, the web user is going to need to read more, and right now
>"more" is back to those 51 pages.
>
>
>--
>Kynn Bartlett  <kynn@idyllmtn.com>
http://www.idyllmtn.com/~kynn/
>Chief Technologist & Co-Owner, Idyll Mountain Internet; Fullerton,
California
>Enroll now for web accessibility with HTML 4.0!
http://www.hwg.org/classes/
>The voice of the future?
http://www.hwg.org/opcenter/w3c/voicebrowsers.html
>
>

Received on Tuesday, 8 December 1998 08:00:40 UTC