- From: Jon Gunderson <jongund@staff.uiuc.edu>
- Date: Mon, 28 Sep 1998 09:04:46 -0500
- To: "Charles (Chuck) Oppermann" <chuckop@microsoft.com>, Charles McCathieNevile <charlesn@sunrise.srl.rmit.edu.au>, Scott Luebking <phoenixl@netcom.com>
- Cc: w3c-wai-ua@w3.org
I would like to move the discussion on the UA guidelines away from judging wether a particular browser is accessible to the "blind" or any other disability. Our primary focus is to develop a list of features for user agents that are useful for people with disabilities to access WWW technologies. Chuck is correct that the W3C only develops recommendations and does not have any enforcement mechanism to force any member organization to follow any W3C recommendations, including such highly visible specifications like HTML 4.0 and CSS1&CSS2. Currently it is primarily market forces that drive a particular companies adherance to W3C recommendations. Remmember that our recommendations must be reviewed by other W3C groups, administration and finally approved by the W3C Advisory committee (which all major browser manufacuters partiicpate). So even if we wanted to have judgement type statements in the UA guidelines(which I don't), I can guarantee they would be weeded out before any proposed recommendation made it to recommendation status. It would also considerably slow down the recommendation process. So let's not waste our previous resources focusing on what any paricular company should or should not do related to accessibility, but let's move our discussions to more important issues like table navigation and dynamic HTML accessibility. If you want to express your opinion on the merits or problems of a particular browser related to accessibility there are plenty of other lists to send your comments, or you can send your comments directly to the comapny. We must restrict our comments on the W3C WAI UA list to user interface issues, if we are to accomplish our goals. The chair and editor, Jon Gunderson Jon Gunderson, Ph.D., ATP Coordinator of Assistive Communication and Information Technology Division of Rehabilitation - Education Services University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign 1207 S. Oak Street Champaign, IL 61820 Voice: 217-244-5870 Fax: 217-333-0248 E-mail: jongund@uiuc.edu WWW: http://www.staff.uiuc.edu/~jongund http://www.als.uiuc.edu/InfoTechAccess
Received on Monday, 28 September 1998 10:06:09 UTC