At 04:24 PM 10/31/00 -0800, Cynthia Shelly wrote:
Is it to have a gestault view of a brochure for the bank, or to get your bank balance? 

No. Not either of those choices and that's the problem with "multiple choice" systems - they ignore all the stuff in between their notion of what the choices should be.

If the "object" is to do one's banking via the Web, it's quite a different matter than "get your bank balance" and in the latter case we may have less disagreement.

The systems are touted to "do banking" and getting one's balance is an extremely trivial part of that process. However in a properly passworded system that shuld be trivially easy to do and it clearly isn't. It is easy at the ATM where the process merely requires PIN entry and prints a balance right there, even as part of another transaction. The Web should be even easier to use than the ATM - for everyone. It's not. That's why we're here.

CS:: "I'm not sure why a synthesized voice reading a Web form is more human than a recorded voice reading a menu.

WL: Because in the former case the user is in control. The synthesized voice can not only read 5X as fast, but can be skipped over and in a familiar context the information is *right there* not at the end of some serialized whim. The former is more like reading, the latter more like being read to and the difference is like night and day.

Spend a full day using a synthesizer instead of a monitor and you'll begin to "get it". It's very hard to do but very instructive and cannot be explained, only experienced. Most of us who write these specs are clueless as to what this world is actually like and wonder (that when we select some upper speed for a voicing system as 350 wpm) why some of the blind guys laugh at us. 600 is not unusable by experienced and inflection is a hindrance for many. Etc., etc.

Among other things, we are here to learn and one of the first principles is that control of all the parameters is absolutely paramount. Being able to skip around (random access of a sort) is so much more significant than we might think. Control is a major part of access and the site where the user chooses trumps any imaginable "being read to" scenario we can ever devise. This is a principle that applies to so many areas that the notion of "permitting" access to a semantically rich source document shouldn't even be considered optional, but mandatory.

We (authors, site designers, database gurus, etc.) shouldn't get to decide what's best for the user. The choices must be there. It's true that a herd of people will go for some equivalent to "final form" in all cases but that's not what we're about - we need to preserve choices for the user and she must be able to choose from the most semantically rich source available.

--
Love.
                ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE