Practical considerations and 1.0 [ was Agenda

Re the question about how much work to put into 1.0

I think the major problem with the 1.0 issues is that they quickly resolve 
to a major consideration, discussion of which we've been postponing.  And I 
think postponing resolution of this issue may well cost us time in the long 
run, since we may have to revisit everything, depending on it's resolution.

The consideration is: how do we deal with business and other practical 
considerations, such as  the need to have blinking banner ads (which led to 
including the word "minimize" in the 2.0 distraction guideline)  There are 
business considerations for other guidelines also which we've been 
ignoring, e.g. the requirement that transcripts be included (what if a 
company wants to sell transcripts?), or the requirement to have good 
navigation (what if company wants users to drill down through pages to get 
additional ad exposures; cf. House of Blues' lawsuit against Streambox, a 
service that offered shortcuts into House of Blues' content)


As I've mentioned, I think we should handle this by factoring practical 
considerations into a separate section, which will allow us to keep 
guidelines and checkpoints themselves absolutely free of compromises  (e.g. 
"minimize") while allowing for understandable and legitimate business and 
other practical concerns in the separate section.

We can then handle future 1.0 problems as follows.  Each time we hit a 1.0 
argument that resolves into balancing accessibility with practical 
considerations, we resolve in the form

"Do X except when section Y applies"

Where X is uncompromising in terms of accessibility, and competing factors 
go into Y.

In 1.0 we can make Y rather ad-hoc, putting in just enough to satisfy 1.0 
issues.  In 2.0 we try to do something more philisophically neat.

This may seem like a distraction from just getting though guidelines and 
checkpoints, but we'll have to do it eventually, and I think it will save 
time in the long run if we settle it now.  Otherwise, we'll be considering 
practical considerations sometimes (e.g. "minimize"), but not always, and 
after all our wordsmithing we'll have to go back and redo all the items 
that weren't consistent with our resolution.

Len

--
Leonard R. Kasday, Ph.D.
Institute on Disabilities/UAP and Dept. of Electrical Engineering at Temple 
University
(215) 204-2247 (voice)                 (800) 750-7428 (TTY)
http://astro.temple.edu/~kasday         mailto:kasday@acm.org

Chair, W3C Web Accessibility Initiative Evaluation and Repair Tools Group
http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/IG/

The WAVE web page accessibility evaluation assistant: 
http://www.temple.edu/inst_disabilities/piat/wave/

Received on Thursday, 25 January 2001 15:55:04 UTC