Re: training doc

At 07:57 AM 6/8/00 -0700, William Loughborough wrote:
>JB:: "good, bad, improvements?"
>
>WL: By a "boggled mind" I mean that you have gone from some beginning
>notes to a full-fleshed, incredibly already usable, impressive entity in
>what seems like a short time while still appearing before a
>sub-committee, attending more teleconferences, and replying to more
>email and interview requests than I could have even when in full
>possession of my faculties. Midn-boggling was in this case
>congratulatory.

JB: Gee, thanks <grin>. I thought I was going too slowly...

>JB:: "Do you have the link for this?[retrofitting paper]
>
>WL: I think I was trying to suggest creation of a "retrofit how-to" by
>those who've done a LOT of retrofitting. We often comment on how
>difficult this is and such a resource would argue on both sides of that
>question. Retrofitting a site with a million PDF files will be lots
>harder than adding a few dozen ALTs, etc. But a recount of the details
>involved in a typical effort might be inspirational for some Webmasters
>who would be daunted by the entire "How to Make an Accessible Site"
>training course.

JB: I think we do need a "how to retrofit" page (and remember that at a
previous call I'd mentioned that a few major corporations may be ready to
write up their experiences on that, and I'm sure we could get some smaller
organizations to as well.) Actually, working with this set of "planning a
training" pages has made me feel that we should revisit the "Getting
Started: Making A Web Site Accessible" page
<http://www.w3.org/WAI/gettingstarted>, and turn that into a similar set.
There is too much information on one page right now; some of it really
needs to be developed more (including the part about how to do an informal
evaluation of your own site, but then that also relates to our "process for
reviewing Web pages" document that we need to move along as well). I'm
thinking that eventually, we'll end up with sets or clusters of pages on
various topics, with a grand central station for an overview of the
resources, and some audience-tailored entry points to the WAI site.

>JB:: "Not sure what you mean here [back button wear].
>
>WL: I go down four levels from the document I'm reading 

JB: I was trying to avoid that in the set-up. Suggestions on how to
minimize it?

>and want to go
>back to what started this off - I must hit back and (in my case of slow
>uploads) wait a long time for each preceding link to reload, 

JB: Hmmm. I made the pages as compact, file-size-wise, as I could. I'm
curious what your bandwidth is?

>hit back
>again, etc. Sometimes the back button shows a pull-down from which I can
>skip some steps and I don't know if that's a universal feature of all
>browsers and if it always works - it's slow and erratic like tooltips.

JB: I don't see that feature in Opera or Navigator.

>JB:: "are you saying that the document set is indeed too layered now"
>
>WL: Exactly the opposite. I think the power of the Web and an important
>aspect that this document can illustrate is in the proliferation of
>easily used inline hyperlinks. I suggest that making hyperlinking
>addictive we will hasten the "everything" part of "everyone, everything
>connected". Skipping footnotes, etc. will speed reading and in the
>process make, e.g. everything pertaining to everything available from
>everything, if you take my meaning. I can start off reading about making
>my site accessible and wind up learning about Wittgenstein and Punk Rock
>and somebody else winds up discovering that there's water under the
>surface of Mars. To be more specific about the instant issue: more links
>from the central document and lots of "central documents". The current
>one is starting well and as I go through it I will make more specific
>suggestions - it would just be nice to be able to actually test them in
>a "scratchpad space" of my own rather than just talking about them. 

JB: For now, how about grabbing:
	http://www.w3.org/WAI/training/overview.html
	http://www.w3.org/WAI/training/lo.html
	http://www.w3.org/WAI/training/ra.html
	http://www.w3.org/WAI/training/ad.html
	http://www.w3.org/WAI/training/pe.html
	http://www.w3.org/WAI/style/wairesource.css
Then you can experiment with those.

We may have a zip package available later today, but not sure.

>This
>would allow me to be more specific and avoid Charles' chastisement about
>how easy it is to "talk the talk" but let's have some specific language,
>etc. - with which I fully agree. QuickTips didn't have this problem
>because a suggestion was specific language: you couldn't get away with
>"let's just terserize the guidelines". Generalities become specifics
>when one must test on one's own version of a document what one proposes.
>Len has suggestions for a tool - he writes one. I think a path should be
>explored - put my keyboard where my mouth is. Group authoring can't be
>done on a single master copy and without the experience of testing ideas
>on one's own the input will be as vague as that about which you query me
>when (if) I suggest "improvements". Instead of "try this" (to some
>editor) - "I tried this and you can see it at..." Chuck had slides to
>work with and it's clear that access to them couldn't be manifold but
>the feedback/modification process might be improved if those making
>suggestions were enabled/forced to test them - hence the idea of having
>my own copy of the entire thing to jack with.
>
>-- 
>Love.
>            ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE
>http://dicomp.pair.com
>
-- 
Judy Brewer    jbrewer@w3.org    +1.617.258.9741    http://www.w3.org/WAI
Director, Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) International Program Office
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
MIT/LCS Room NE43-355, 545 Technology Square, Cambridge, MA,  02139,  USA

Received on Thursday, 8 June 2000 11:36:42 UTC