The presentation is unnecessarily difficult.

Name: Wayne Dick
Email: wed@csulb.edu
Affiliation: Rep for CSU Long Beach on WAI / EOWG
Document: W2
Item Number: Accessibility Support of Web Technologies
Part of Item: 
Comment Type: technical
Summary of Issue: The presentation is unnecessarily difficult.
Comment (Including rationale for any proposed change):
Accessibility supported is very tricky.  I think that this first presentation is to strained.

Problem 1:  The barrier is not clear

Problem 2:  The concept of accessibility supported is tangled with it relationship to conformance to WCAG 2.0 success criteria. This makes both more difficult to understand.

Problem 3: The criteria for including a Web technology in a list of is a complex conditional with two parallel outer clauses.  The inner clauses are not stated in a parallel format reducing readability.

Problem 4: The second class of Accessible Supported Technologies - those that are supported by a widely distributed user agent seems ambiguous.  Consider this  example. I use a combination of reading assistants to read.  I do not use Jaws, because many of the features distract me.  Now if a Web technology was supported by JAWA (which is widely distributed - and remember AT is a UA) but not my system or reading assistants would I have to buy JAWS or learn the interface of the free version just to access that resource.  To me that seems disproportionately difficult for me, but where is the line.  Did you mean that.  Did you mean mainstream user agent.  It is not clear, even in the precise  List membership criteria \"an accessibility supported user agent is widely available\".. (don\'t trust my quote exactly.)



My solution to 1-3 below does not address the Problem 4 - my ambiguity issue.



Now I tried to read it and translate it faithfully.  I moved some notes into the text.  See my rewrite in the proposed change below.  If my interpretation is wrong then consider the fact that a mathematician and computer science professor read this carefully and got it wrong. A garden variety web developer may not have a chance.



Now I tried to read it and translate it faithfully.  I moved some notes into the text.  If my interpretation is wrong then consider the fact that a mathematician and computer science department professor read this carefully and got it wrong. A garden variety web developer may not have a chance.



Proposed Change:
I have rewritten it at:



http://www.csulb.edu/~wed/eo/accsup.html



I stripped off the W3 logo, but kept the document style to keep the context.



EOWG found it too long to discuss today, so they had me send it along directly.  I think you can benefit from some of the wording and organization.  The original was quite difficult for me and my PhD is in mathematics.

Received on Friday, 29 June 2007 16:14:26 UTC