re: skill level

No, this isn't the distinction I am making, but it makes me think that maybe
there are some intersting points in here and this example might be a good
one after all.

I can point to a colour wheel and click the colour I see. To make this
accessible, there should be a way of finding out what the colour is evenif
you can't see it (are colourblind, blind, have a monochrome monitor today,
etc). One common way of doing this is to provide a set of colour
codes. Another way is to name a series of colours. If it were possible to
name the millions of colours available in theory with 24-bit colour, then
that would be alright. In practice it makes more sense to group them into
named blocks, (like areas on an image map) as well as providing the technical
details. In principle it should be the same amount of difficulty for all
people to use the tool. In prctice there are disabilities which mean that
this cannot always be done, and it is harder for some people than for
others. We aim to remove this distinction as much as possible. We may never
remove it completely, but we can in a lot of contexts, and make it less of a
problem in a lot of others.

But what I was actually saying intially is something different. In the image
editor I use a lot there are several different ways of encoding colour. RGB I
sort of understand, and theer are a couple of others with different names
that I don't really undserstand. I think one of them is based on the
four-colour printing process that used different levels of Magenta, Cyan,
Yellow and Black to produce colours. There are others again. (I once went to
a lecture on this. it was fascinating but I didn't learn everything
presented.) What I was saying is that for a tool which provides this choice
(photoshop, paintshop pro, xv, all do I think, and I imagine lots of others
do as well) the functionality of using the different encodings needs to be
there, and how to do it accesibly needs to be explained (by 7.1). But
explaining the difference between the different encodings is a question of
intended skill level of the user - it's not really an accessibility issue.


cheers

Charles McCN

On Tue, 30 Nov 1999, Kynn Bartlett wrote:

  At 01:36 PM 11/30/1999 , Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
  >In fact we are saying "can be used by people regardless of disability". This
  >has important bearing on the skill level discussion, since we do not require
  >that a tool be obviously useful to anyone who picks it up.
  >As an example, consider an image editor. It needs to be accesible to a blind
  >user, by allowing them to edit properties of the image. But if it provides
  >several different methods of colour selection (eg Pantone, RGB, CYKM) like
  >some advanced (and even some not so advanced) tools, then it needs to explain
  >how to use the methods, but doesn't need to explain what the difference
  >between RGB and Pantone slection is - that is assumed in the skill levfel of
  >the user. 
  
  So is it okay for it to be considerably much harder to use if you're
  a PWD, as long as you can use it?  (Confirming, not challenging.)
  
  If my mom wants to make a web page have a particular shade of blue
  background, she just points at that color on a color wheel and clicks --
  if she were blind, she'd have to learn RGB codes most likely.  This is
  the distinction you're making, correct?
  
  -- 
  Kynn Bartlett                                    mailto:kynn@hwg.org
  President, HTML Writers Guild                    http://www.hwg.org/
  AWARE Center Director                          http://aware.hwg.org/
  

--Charles McCathieNevile    mailto:charles@w3.org  phone: +61 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative                    http://www.w3.org/WAI
21 Mitchell Street, Footscray, VIC 3011,  Australia (I've moved!)

Received on Tuesday, 30 November 1999 17:03:13 UTC