Re: Adopting the media accessibility requirements

On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 8:24 AM, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi> wrote:
>> Henri: if somebody told you they need a table element and they need to
>> be able to have a header text that flies in from the left, makes some
>> circles while turning the text orientation 360 degrees and is placed
>> into its spot after that, continuing to blink, would you also tell
>> them that that cannot be a "must" requirement?
>
> Yes.

I had the same reaction as Henri here.

What is being unclear to me in this whole discussion, possibly because
different people have different interpretations, is what "must" and
"may" etc mean in this context.

When the accessibility requirements document says that something is a
"must" level requirement, does this mean:

1) That some user has said: I must have this feature.
2) That some user has said: I must have this feature in order for a
HTML5 document to be as accessible to me as it is for people that
doesn't have the disability X that I have.
3) The TF says: We must have this feature in order to ship HTML5.

In other words, if we "adopt these requirements", does it mean:

1) We believe the TF when it says that a user has requested the feature.
2) We believe the TF when it says that a user has requested the
feature in order to make a HTML5 documents as accessible to people
with disability X as to people without it.
3) We can't ship HTML5 without this feature.


These are distinctly different things and it would be great to get
clarified which one is intended. For what it's worth, if 1 or 2 is the
answer here, then I have no problems believing that at all, and if it
makes anyone happy I'd be willing to adopt these requirements as long
as it's made clear what adopting them mean. However I'd also like to
point out that we've had people say that they must have the ability to
connect <table> directly to a server-side SQL backend [1].

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2008Nov/0015.html

/ Jonas

Received on Saturday, 30 October 2010 19:56:35 UTC