Cognitive difficulties

Anne and myself have been raising the fact that the WAI site is inaccessible
to non-techy readers, and that the guidelines are far too biased towards
blind disabilities, for a number of months.
There is little evidence of any action being taken.

I realise that present members may not have the necessary skills.
However burying oneself in the current deluge of 3.1, 3.1a, 3.1aa etc is not
helpful or indicative of an intention to change.
It may be essential, but is not addressing what we see as the main problem.

Thanking you all for your good intentions and willingness to change.
What changes are being proposed, for discussion?

jay@peepo.com

Jonathan Chetwynd
Special needs teacher / web accessibility consultant
education and outreach working group member, web accessibility initiative,
W3C
----- Original Message -----
From: Scott Luebking <phoenixl@netcom.com>
To: <apembert@crosslink.net>; <charles@w3.org>; <jay@peepo.com>;
<phoenixl@netcom.com>
Cc: <nir@nirdagan.com>; <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2000 4:16 PM
Subject: Re: Does the user know for sure whether the page is dynamic or


> Hi, Anne
>
> The comment was a general solution to a problem.  There are of course
> situations where it may not always be true.  I'm also very dependent on
> visual information, but I believed that bringing up the issues of people
> who are dependent on visual information would have been distracting from
the
> main point I was making.  My goal was not to solve all possible conflicts.
>
> Scott
>
>
>
> > Scott,
> >
> > That would be true only if the *only* disability that affected web use
was
> > blindness. As you know it isn't, and the needs of some sighted folks are
> > for the very features that exclude or annoy the blind user. During the
> > summer there was a lengthy discussion of the needs of one of the largest
> > groups of disabled users, and Jonathan, myself, and others pointed out
that
> > text itself is sometimes a barrier, and that text without the visual
cues
> > (varied size, bold titles and subtitles, brackets and parentheses,
> > quotation marks, etc.) often render text as difficult to navigate or
> > totally useless to many persons whose disabilities are cognitively
based.
> > Although my own cognitive differences are minor, I am a very visual
person,
> > and I have difficulty with posts to this list where the words <quote>
and
> > <unquote> are inserted in the text. I have to read the post several
times
> > to get the meaning. My husband, with significant cognitive differences,
> > would just skip the whole thing as unreadable. Even tho my husband is
> > "visually impaired" due to loss of one eye and ripening cataracts on the
> > other, he is graphically visual rather than textually visual. The
> > guidelines that are supposed to help dyslexic web users do him no good
at
> > all.
> >
> > Whether the pages are generated dynamically or statically doesn't change
> > that fact, unless there is something unique about dynamically-generated
> > pages that I am unaware of.  If the graphics, multi-media, and visual
cues
> > are absent, the meaning isn't conveyed.
> >
> > Anne
>
>

Received on Friday, 28 January 2000 04:04:11 UTC