Response from Jon Gunderson on Comment 1

----------------------------------------------------------
Comment 1:

Source: http://www.w3.org/mid/20060612134547.CA28447B9F@mojo.w3.org
(Issue ID: LC-760)

Part of Item:
Comment Type: TE
Comment (including rationale for proposed change):

This should be success criteria 1 like in the Priority 1 WCAG 1.0 requirement.  It is impossible for people using speech to guess at language changes.  We have a lot of web based foriegn  language courses at UIUC and we have identified that speech users cannot determine when to manually switch their synthesizer languages, even when they know that there are more than one language on the resource.

If changes in language are available modern screen readers will automatically switch the lanaguge of the synthesizer.

Proposed Change:

Move this requirement to Success Criteria 1

----------------------------
Response from Working Group:
----------------------------

There were comments to combine 3.1.1 and 3.1.2, to move them up and to move them down. After much discussion, the consensus of the working group was to leave them in the current positions.

Response from Jon Gunderson:
The working group response is very disappointing.  I believe it is probably much easier for someone to guess the overall language of a web resource than language changes within the web resources.  I cannot understand any arguments on why language CHANGES are not critical for accessibility especially for anyone using speech (Visual impairments and learning disabilities).  I have seen students have to drop courses at UIUC because language changes were not part of the content.  In the era of on-line learning you will be allowing content with multiple languages to comply at a Single-A level without their content being usable by many people with disabilities.

Jon Gunderson, Ph.D.
Director of IT Accessibility Services (CITES)
and 
Coordinator of Assistive Communication and Information Technology (DRES)

WWW: http://www.cita.uiuc.edu/
WWW: https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/jongund/www/

Received on Wednesday, 6 June 2007 13:48:48 UTC