RE: 3.1: Proposal with links to Guide docs

An excerpt from my "cover letter" transmitting the 3.1 proposal to the
list, followed by Joe Clark's response:

<blockquote>
>> So at levels 2 and 3 there are SC that call for graphical and/or 
>> spoken-word representations of information otherwise presented in 
>> text,
>
>
> I've been objecting to this for three years (it's a Chaalsism that is
> apparently unkillable), as have many others, including another blind 
> person, Greg Rosmaita. You can*not* force people to draw or speak or 
> perform a solo acoustic guitar performance just to meet WCAG.
>
</blockquote>

A couple of points:

1. Joe's comment responds to my *description* of certain elements of the
proposal, not to the proposal itself. My comments lumped together some
very complex issues  that are addressed in different success criteria at
different levels of conformance.  

2. It's already common practice to provide alternative versions of
complex tent content, at least in some situations.  Scientific articles,
technical reports, financial analyses, scholarly papers, etc., are often
accompanied by abstracts, executive summaries, and the like.  These are
short texts which in many cases could be revised for improved
readability.  Again, it's common practice for scientific and technical
papers, technical documentation, etc., etc. to include charts, diagrams,
and other visual illustrations whose purpose is to clarify complex ideas
and processes presented in text form.  And we are starting to find sites
that include spoken-word recordings of text that have been produced by
running the text through a text-to-speech conversion program (such as
TextAloud or many similar ones, some free, others not); the result files
are saved as mp3 format and linked from the   There are also server-side
solutions that ma e useful in some cases.

At Level 2 these are "alternative alternatives" (<grin>).  That is, the
success criterioin calls for "one or more" of these alternatives in
specific cases.  At level 3 they would all be required.

And, of course, at Level 2 there is one more option: the original
complex text could be revised to improve readability so that the
requirement for alternative versions wouldn't be triggered.

Johnpage.

-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Lisa Seeman
Sent: Tuesday, May 10, 2005 2:57 PM
To: Joe Clark
Cc: WAI-GL
Subject: Re: 3.1: Proposal with links to Guide docs



>> So at levels 2 and 3 there are SC that call for graphical and/or
>> spoken-word representations of information otherwise presented in
text,
>
>
> I've been objecting to this for three years (it's a Chaalsism that is 
> apparently unkillable), as have many others, including another blind 
> person, Greg Rosmaita. You can*not* force people to draw or speak or 
> perform a solo acoustic guitar performance just to meet WCAG.
>
my take (and i think Charles was thinking on the same lines) is to 
enable conversion to symbols,  icons,  and  schematics at the user end.
This can now be done using RDF with xhtml or using roles  in XHTML 2.0.

Other techniques include using standard CSS classes to the same affect.
(of course providing symbols yourself will also do..;)

All the best

Received on Wednesday, 11 May 2005 17:58:11 UTC