Re: Priority Definitions for Sections 2 and 3

BTW, yes, "naive authors" sucks as a term because you or I know what
it means, but it may be misunderstood.

A better choice of words would be appreciated, although I don't agree
that "non-technical authors" is what we're looking for here.  We're
not just talking about non-techies, we're talking about possibly very
techy folks who just happen to (a) use a WYSIWYG editor and (b) have
no special knowledge of HTML or accessibility of HTML.

Anything that prevents those people from creating accessible content
should fall under P1 sanctions, in my opinion.  It's like text-only
users -- if we solve the ALT problem, that's the biggest part of the
accessible content battle and takes a big chunk out of the inaccess-
ibility of the web.  Make a page that's usable in lynx, you're almost
all the way there in many cases.

Likewise, if we can solve this problem for the untrained author using
a WYSIWYG editor, we've solved the biggest obstacle in web authoring
tools.  So our goal needs to be putting them first, and people who
can edit DTDs on a whim as lower priority.  Emphasize that authoring
tools _must_ allow a clueless author (bad term) to make an accessible
web page.  That should be our minimum requirement.

--
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@hwg.org>
President, Governing Board Member
HTML Writers Guild <URL:http://www.hwg.org>
Director, Accessible Web Authoring Resources and Education Center
  <URL:http://aware.hwg.org/>

Received on Wednesday, 21 April 1999 19:26:41 UTC