Re: User Contexts: identifying assistive technologies

Richard Schwerdtfeger <schwer@us.ibm.com> wrote:
> There are sites that
> will turn off access features for performance reason if they are able. 

Presumably they could turn them off by default and enable them only if the
user's context profile indicates a requirement for captions, descriptions or
anything else indicative of access needs. This can happen entirely in the
absence of any key in the profile that explicitly discloses assistive
technologies.

Note that, as previously stated, I have substantial concerns about the misuse
of an assistive-technology-identifying property, but the particular misuse
that you identified above unfortunately could apply as an argument against
most of User Contexts, not just against this specific capability.

User-agent strings are exactly the analogy that I had in mind here, which I
think places me in full agreement with Raman on the point. On the other hand,
I don't think the privacy issues are any different from those associated with
other aspects of User Contexts, which implies that I'm in a slight
disagreement with Andy (his reasons, not his conclusion). Interoperability
considerations and standards-conformance are the decisive issues for me.

As an aside, the conformance section of WCAG 2.0 is clear: a Web page (as
defined in the spec) conforms if "a conforming alternate version is provided".
Thus it's permissible so far as WCAG is concerned to require users to disclose
a need for accessibility in order for it to be provided, and to serve a highly
inaccessible version by default.

Received on Thursday, 6 June 2013 05:20:32 UTC