RE: structure view is not solely a navigation tool

<<
Navigation and manipulation by this
tree provides a great improvement in accessibility of the document to
users of devices which are inherently slower than large visual displays,
as well as to authors of large documents, or people with various cognitive
disabilities.
>>

Can you give some real world data to support these claims of "great
improvement in accessibility" and "significant accessibility gain"?  How are
you arriving at these conclusions?

The W3C has usability specialists on staff - maybe they can conduct a study
to find out the actual benefit achieved by various groups of people with
disabilities.

<<
In the second case I would argue for a P2, and for upgrading the
requirement for accessible 'site maps' to P1, 
>>

So, even though the problem has not been clearly defined, the need for a
solution is debatable and greatest benefit is to the smallest set of users
(document editors using speech output), there is a proposed priority already
and that 1?

Again, I can see that this might be helpful feature for some people editing
documents, but as a developer, I'm going to have to pick and choose which
features to implement.  Are you saying that this feature is going to be more
important than, say for example, providing accessible sample sites and
templates?  Or putting information in the product documentation on
accessible web content creation?

I propose that the working group completely table section 3 until section 2
is completed.  Let's solve the problems for the 95% case and then deal with
the problems in the 5% case.

Charles Oppermann
Program Manager, Microsoft Accessibility and Disabilities Group
http://www.microsoft.com/enable/

Received on Wednesday, 10 March 1999 12:15:11 UTC