re: Technique or Checkpoint

Why I think it is a checkpoint:

Including pre-written descripitions, which are generated by professionals,
will provide a high-quality text ready-made. This significantly reduces
the energy required of the author to improve the accessibility of the page
by adding the description, and is likely to result in high-quality
descriptions becoming standard.

It doesn't stop people from writing better ones, merely provides a high
'clearing-floor level'. There are various ways that the information could
be included, for example having a searchable database of images and
descriptions, including them as 'summary information' in the format of
the data itself, (GIF allows this - it is generally only used for making
animated gifs, or providing image libraryies which came with a URL for
each image that was a description of the image in some central registry.
(This doesn't work offline, but does allow online users of the image to
have the description cached, and therefore promotes the use of the image.
Good for marketing, bad for people who like indivduality). Those methods
are what I would consider techniques.

Charles McCN

On Thu, 11 Feb 1999, William Loughborough wrote:

  The checkpoint would be a general urge to do something; the techniue
  should be to (among other things?) include canned (profesionally
  written?) descriptions.
  -- 
  Love.
              ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE
  http://dicomp.pair.com
  

--Charles McCathieNevile            mailto:charles@w3.org
phone: +1 617 258 0992   http://purl.oclc.org/net/charles
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative    http://www.w3.org/WAI
MIT/LCS  -  545 Technology sq., Cambridge MA, 02139,  USA

Received on Thursday, 11 February 1999 19:18:30 UTC