Re: W3C Process and WCAG 2.0 Public Working Draft 17/05/07

Re: W3C Process and  WCAG 2.0 Public Working Draft 17/05/07

Why do we need to include people with learning disabilities or low  
literacy in creating web standards?
One in five people in the UK is functionally illiterate.

to each one of you that remains concerned,

Users need to be involved in the development of standards, including  
but not limited to WAI standards. This is the structural fault within  
W3C process that needs to be resolved.

It is not sufficient to rely on the well intentioned and excellent  
intellectual prowess of developers. They create to suit their own and  
their corporate needs.

User groups need to include people with low literacy and learning  
disabilities.
Corporations and developers need to test their products with users,  
but amazingly in an email today, a director of one of the largest web  
corporations advised me they do not include users in their  
development process.

The evidence is that after more than a decade there are no easy to  
use tools for independently publishing HTML, SVG or other W3C  
technologies.

I have already written to Ian, Tim, Chris and others to state this case.

regarding WCAG2 in particular:

whilst it is true that I attended the conference calls, I did not  
agree the outcomes.
we were limited to discussing a paragraph that has subsequently been  
significantly diluted in intent**.

it can be found as the last paragraph in the introduction here:
  http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/#intro

regards

Jonathan Chetwynd
Accessibility Consultant on Learning Disabilities and the Internet

29 Crimsworth Road
SW8 4RJ

020 7978 1764

http://www.eas-i.co.uk

**or as Joe wrote
"...the ostensibly open process of the W3C actually isn’t open: It’s  
dominated by multinationals; the opinions of everyone other than  
invited experts can be and are ignored; the Working Group can claim  
that “consensus” has been reached even in the face of unresolved  
internal disagreement; invited-expert status has been refused or  
revoked; the process is itself inaccessible to people with  
disabilities, like deaf people; WCAG Working Group chairs have acted  
like bullies.

The “open” W3C process simply didn’t work. We tried something else."

http://wcagsamurai.org/errata/intro.html

Received on Tuesday, 12 June 2007 21:37:32 UTC