Re: W3C Process and WCAG 2.0 Public Working Draft 17/05/07

I agree that we have a problem that we have not yet managed to  
address. I am currently in Cambodia working with the millions here,  
and representative of them in many countries, who are not only low- 
literacy but second language people whose own cultural communities  
will not for many years produce web content for them and so they are  
reliant on, for example, English content. We are part of the One  
Laptop Per Child Project and that project alone will give millions of  
children and their families connectivity within a very few months but  
sadly, they will not be able to access content that is suitable for  
them because it will not be identified as low-literacy (a lack of  
metadata) and not designed to be transformed for low-literacy.

I am really shocked by the lack of accessibility for these  
communities and  consider it quite a high priority, especially as in  
many cases it also means critical health, safety, .....

Liddy

On 13/06/2007, at 7:37 AM, ~:'' ありがとうございました。  
wrote:

>
> Re: W3C Process and  WCAG 2.0 Public Working Draft 17/05/07
>
> Why do we need to include people with learning disabilities or low  
> literacy in creating web standards?
> One in five people in the UK is functionally illiterate.
>
> to each one of you that remains concerned,
>
> Users need to be involved in the development of standards,  
> including but not limited to WAI standards. This is the structural  
> fault within W3C process that needs to be resolved.
>
> It is not sufficient to rely on the well intentioned and excellent  
> intellectual prowess of developers. They create to suit their own  
> and their corporate needs.
>
> User groups need to include people with low literacy and learning  
> disabilities.
> Corporations and developers need to test their products with users,  
> but amazingly in an email today, a director of one of the largest  
> web corporations advised me they do not include users in their  
> development process.
>
> The evidence is that after more than a decade there are no easy to  
> use tools for independently publishing HTML, SVG or other W3C  
> technologies.
>
> I have already written to Ian, Tim, Chris and others to state this  
> case.
>
> regarding WCAG2 in particular:
>
> whilst it is true that I attended the conference calls, I did not  
> agree the outcomes.
> we were limited to discussing a paragraph that has subsequently  
> been significantly diluted in intent**.
>
> it can be found as the last paragraph in the introduction here:
>  http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/#intro
>
> regards
>
> Jonathan Chetwynd
> Accessibility Consultant on Learning Disabilities and the Internet
>
> 29 Crimsworth Road
> SW8 4RJ
>
> 020 7978 1764
>
> http://www.eas-i.co.uk
>
> **or as Joe wrote
> "...the ostensibly open process of the W3C actually isn’t open:  
> It’s dominated by multinationals; the opinions of everyone other  
> than invited experts can be and are ignored; the Working Group can  
> claim that “consensus” has been reached even in the face of  
> unresolved internal disagreement; invited-expert status has been  
> refused or revoked; the process is itself inaccessible to people  
> with disabilities, like deaf people; WCAG Working Group chairs have  
> acted like bullies.
>
> The “open” W3C process simply didn’t work. We tried something  
> else."
>
> http://wcagsamurai.org/errata/intro.html
>
>
>

Received on Wednesday, 13 June 2007 02:25:51 UTC