Dumb Idea

Kynn suggested producing two sets of guidelines.

I think this is a bad idea. The likelihood of guidelines being implemented
seems to decrease with the number of different documents. It also becomes
easier to say "well, we conform the the Authoring Tool Guidelines
(content)" and ignore the fact that disabled people cannot use the tools.

Since Authoring Tools of some kind are really necessary to be an effective
publisher on the web, the failure to make them accessible amounts to the
exclusion of disabled people from publishing, merely on account of their
disability. (this is what Gregory and Kelly said last week)

Splitting the documents does not seem necessary. Those companies who are
really trying to make accessible tools, but who have no idea how to do it
and are relying on the documents we are producing, will only be able to
implement as much as we have written. It seems to me more valuable to have
them implement many of the things necessary to help make the content
produced accessible and to implement many of the things that make the tool
itself accessible than to concentrate solely on the content produced, and
force disabled people trying to work with their tools to wait until
everyone else has been catered for. (This was essentially my rationale
behind rejecting the process proposal that we ignore section 3 until we
have section 2 completed. I suspect it was a lot of people's rationale.)

Charles

--Charles McCathieNevile            mailto:charles@w3.org
phone: +1 617 258 0992   http://www.w3.org/People/Charles
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative    http://www.w3.org/WAI
MIT/LCS  -  545 Technology sq., Cambridge MA, 02139,  USA

Received on Monday, 29 March 1999 15:48:20 UTC