- From: William Loughborough <love26@gorge.net>
- Date: Tue, 06 Jul 1999 06:39:57 -0700
- To: Jason White <jasonw@ariel.ucs.unimelb.EDU.AU>
- CC: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
First may we divide the audience for Conformance/Priority 'twixt those
who must and those who would "conform" with our Guidelines. The very
word "guideline" seems divorced from compulsion and perhaps even from
conformance. An intelligent author really will not be convinced that
putting a language indicator within a document containing only one
language will matter much for accessibility, the same for many other
features: she will decide priorities on her own.
In the case of Regulated situations there must be some pass/fail,
reasonably objective checkpoints and this is the real reason for
priorities and conformance levels: so that the U.S. Federal Hearing
Officer can decide if Section 508 (which will likely ultimately refer to
WCAG) is satisfied by the purchase of WidgetMaster 1.3 or a Web designer
has indeed made the information accessible to PWDs.
Although I voted against more than one priority (include/exclude a
guideline/checkpoint) because I felt that if it wasn't important it
shouldn't be there, I know that the reason my POV didn't prevail is
because it was felt there were significant differences between
inaccessible, difficult to access, and easier to access (must, should,
nice).
Given that we have only one document, there seems to be little point in
worrying that people might ask "what *must* I do?" instead of "how can I
help?" - we just have to explain, perhaps endlessly.
--
Love.
ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE
http://dicomp.pair.com
Received on Tuesday, 6 July 1999 09:39:42 UTC