Any hope?

The problems we face using the traditional avenues for education and
outreach are clearly overwhelming.  This quote from Kelly Ford on
webwatch-l summarizes it:

"Now I can write to the designer of the site as you can see from this
message.  Hopefully he'll take an interest in accessibility and correct
things but who knows.  That's not a negative against the designer,
rather a statement based on previous experience that most of the time
writing to folks doesn't work.

"I wonder what the long term solution to web accessibility is going to
be? Are we going to be able to use fewer and fewer web sites until the
arena is closed to us?  I could spend my entire day simply attempting to
communicate with folks about web accessibility.  That's all well and
good but at some point I'd like to simply use the web for the things I
want to get done."

While we bail our sinking USS Access using teaspoons the Web is flooding
us with cloudbursts of increasingly inaccessible materials.  Does
anybody think that the path we are taking has any hope of success
insofar of allowing equal use of the Web by PWDs?  Can't we explore the
possibility of intervening into the nature of the structure of the
protocols or whatever to: force separation of content from presentation;
make compliance a prerequesite for publicqation?  If this is impossible
or just unthinkable then it seems clear that we are proposing to tilt at
windmills whose rotors are going to grind us up, spit us out, and leave
our friends/clients even further outdistanced in the area of access.
-- 
Love.
            ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE
http://dicomp.pair.com

Received on Tuesday, 28 July 1998 23:43:27 UTC