Re: Adopting the media accessibility requirements

> 2) The list of requirements has requirements that are obviously bogus
> in the sense that it's obvious that the requirements aren't
> technically necessary to achieve accessibility. I think it's not
> credible to suggest that metadata for copyright information or usage
> rights is a "must" level technical requirement for *accessibility*. I
> think it's also not credible to require voice-optimized codec
> availability on the 'must' level, since it should be blatantly obvious
> that accessibility would be achievable using a general-purpose audio
> codec. Likewise, the accessibility would obviously be achievable by
> supporting at least one character encoding that can represent all of
> Unicode (e.g. UTF-8), so support for arbitrary character encodings
> can't be a hard *accessibility* requirement.

To clarify why I used the word "credible":
When a list of purported accessibility requirements contains requirements that obviously aren't real *accessibility* requirements, one must suspect that some of the requirements one can't directly see the merit of can also turn out to be something other than must-satisfy true accessibility requirements. Thus, the inclusion on non-accessibility requirements casts a doubt over the other requirements as well.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Thursday, 28 October 2010 10:15:51 UTC