Re: conflation of issues or convergence of interests?

At 00:00 -0700 UTC, on 2007-07-31, L. David Baron wrote:

> On Tuesday 2007-07-31 08:39 +0200, Sander Tekelenburg wrote:
>> At 21:17 -0700 UTC, on 2007-07-30, L. David Baron wrote:
>> > On Tuesday 2007-07-31 05:25 +0200, Sander Tekelenburg wrote:
>>
>> [... title="" to suppress @alt tooltips in a some specific UA]
>>
>> >> How is that not an authoring error? It's not the author's job fix UA
>>bugs.
>> >
>> > Web authors spend a significant portion of their time working around
>> > UA bugs.  They want their page to be accessible to the portion of
>> > their users with buggy browsers
>>
>> I can't follow. Which definition of accessible are you using here?
>
> Is there more than one that apply here?

Apparently: <http://www.w3.org/mid/p06240612c2d2c12fe362@%5B192.168.0.101%5D>
(Couldn't quickly find the confusion that preceded that. Sorry.)

> "X is accessible to Y"
> means "Y is able to access/use X".  I'm not limiting the term to
> just accessibility to people with disabilities, though.

Right, that's how I used it too, up until a few days ago when it became clear
that different people are insisting on using different definitions. Which
means we need to either every time include our definition when we use the
term, or collectively decide which term means what.

For the moment I'm attempting to go along with "univerality" to mean what you
and I call "accessibility", and "accessibiliy" to mean "accessibility to
people with disablities". Feels like quite a stretch though, so i don't know
if I'll keep it up. And it's useful only anyway if we all use the same
terminology.

>> >, just as they want their page to be
>> > accessible to the portion who are blind, etc.
>>
>> But in this particular example we're talking about an authoring trick that
>> makes the page less accessible to blind (and other) users, aren't we?
>
> How does it make the page less accessible to blind users?

I thought that title="" makes the contents of alt="" not available on hover
in some UAs (that that was in fact the point of authoring title=""). As I
understand it, that makes it unaccesible to
- a blind user relying on a screen reader
- a user with bad eye-sight who would benefit from accessing both
- a user who for whatever reason has problems grasping what they image is
meant to convey and would thus benefit from access to @alt.

[...]

> Why all these changes?  What do they improve?

They improve the Web. Were all the previous posts on the subject by so many
different people really that unclear? If so, could you ask for clarification
on the specific poinst raised please? That's more useful than asking for a
rewrite of the entire subject.

Basically the aim is to make it easier for authors to provide users, through
UAs, easy to discover and consume equivalents, and thus a more usable Web for
everybody.


-- 
Sander Tekelenburg
The Web Repair Initiative: <http://webrepair.org/>

Received on Wednesday, 1 August 2007 22:29:48 UTC