Re: Investigating terminology & structure with HTML examples

WC:: "I know this is going in the opposite direction of where William is
pushing (to list only the principles and work from there)"

WL: William doesn't want to not do techniques/examples/checkpoints or
even guidelines. He just thinks that most of what needs doing with those
things has been done fairly well despite all the swirling. What William
wants (not that it matters much) is to work on the part that: 1) has
received mostly "intro text" type treatment; 2) was one thing we spoke
of doing for new guidelines - provide something more general/abstract so
that it could be normative and allow the other stuff to focus on what
Kynn feels is the meat of the matter. I (speaking only for myself, not
for the senior citizen lobby) don't think the techniques are all that
opaque and if there were a way to get to them without downloading an
entire encyclopedia of disclaimers, copyright notices, etc. would
probably be quite useful to the poor overstressed Web designer who just
wants to find out how to make the damn government happy with the
accessiblity aspect of his creation. There's even example code in there
folks, and if we keep at it there will be pointers to examples of sites
(or portions thereof) that exemplify the "how" of all this stuff. Much
of that still needs doing and organizing and editing and testing and...
but IMO we still need to have some resounding perpetual truths writ
large that say what all this is *really* for. 

Maybe Kynn's concerns are well-placed and we are calling for a simple
text site to be accessible by lots of media means. I don't read it that
way. I just don't think you have to have a captioned, text-described,
sound movie with everything you present. If the language states
(implies?) that, it needs changing. I think that's the other side of the
coin that rails agains "dumbing down" one's "cool" site so that a bunch
of cripples can read it. Neither view is accurate. 

There's a lot to do and perhaps by Bristol time we'll have cooled out
enough to have a plan for doing it. Most of it is editing what we've
got.

So "What William Thinks" (in his irreverent pomposity) is that one of
the things we need address is what Jason quite nicely labeled
"Principles". Not at the expense of "how-to"s or with the aim of
upsetting our well-established guideline/checkpoint terminology, but
just to generalize and abstract things nicely. I prefer brevity but if
tersifying leads to obscuration, get long!

-- 
Love.
            ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE
http://dicomp.pair.com

Received on Tuesday, 15 August 2000 20:39:45 UTC