Re: Testing web page accessibility by phone

Hi,

Perhaps another way to look at web pages is as vehicles.  For some
vehicles, a driver needs only basic skills.  For other vehicles, like
semi's or busses, additional skills are needed.  For many blind people,
often web pages are like driving semi's when they have only the basic
driving skills.

Some people may not consider amount of time to be an issue for
accessibility.  Other people do.  Recently, the national president of
NFB spoke on the Berkeley campus and gave the audience the distinct
impression that amount of time can be an accessibility issue.  For
example, suppose a manager is evaluating two employees who have the same
job which uses web pages, but one is sighted and the other is blind.
The blind worker takes 5 times as long as the sighted person doing the
same work.  If they have the equivalent background, the probability is
that the blind person is not likely to be evaluated as well as the
sighted person performing the task.  If part of the job requirements, is
performing the various tasks within certain amounts of time, the blind
person could be seen as not being able to meet the job requirements.
From a fiscal point of view, the company could use the money paid for
the blind worker to hire a sighted person to get 5 times as much work
done.  Which would be more cost effective?  (It is hard to tell a business
that they shouldn't worry about cost-effectivesness.)

If accessibility can be measured strictly objectively, why are there different
standards, e.g. W3C, 508.

Scott

> Web pages are like cars.  you need to know how to drive before getting
> into one.
> 
> If it takes a blind person or any person a certain amount of time to do
> something as opposed to some other person, what does this say?  It only
> serves to tell me that different methods of getting from here to there
> produce different results.  This does not speak to the question of
> accessibility.  Accessibility can be measured quite objectively.
> Compare two copies of the same page.  One has been developped to
> validate and with the wcag applied in a sensable way.  the other is the
> same page but has been developped independantly without these
> groundings.  Now, take those two pages and test them around with all
> kinds of people and look at the results.

Received on Tuesday, 28 May 2002 21:53:46 UTC