Re: tired of this thread

At 10:34 AM 6/17/1999 , William Loughborough wrote:
>There is no action being
>taken, not because of indifference, but because we don't know
>SPECIFICALLY what to do.

William is making an important point here.  The only reason that
we can tell people to make pages accessible to, for example,
blind people is that someone wrote down specific steps.  We have
the WCAG to refer to, and before that we had various other
guidelines from Trace and elsewhere.

If you tell web designers "make your pages accessible!" most
of them will respond, and ask you "okay, how?"  This is why we
need nearly 100 checkpoints spelled out in almost excrutiating
detail, with plenty of Techniques and examples.

Lacking that, people will just think we're blowing smoke and
will write us off.  That's what we're seeing here, I think --
those of us who _don't_ have expertise in the subject would
like those of us who _do_ to step forward and present concrete
ideas.  The substance of which could then be incorporated into
highly detailed, structured form of Guidelines, Checkpoints,
Techniques, and examples.

At the very least, we'd like to see a "before" picture of an
inaccessible page, and then an "after" picture that shows
exactly what changes were necessary (and why) to improve the
accessibility.  In all this discussion, no concrete examples
such as that have been provided.  Is it too much to ask?

--
Kynn Bartlett                                    mailto:kynn@hwg.org
President, HTML Writers Guild                    http://www.hwg.org/
AWARE Center Director                          http://aware.hwg.org/

Received on Thursday, 17 June 1999 13:51:35 UTC