- From: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>
- Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 15:48:18 -0500 (EST)
- To: WAI AU Guidelines <w3c-wai-au@w3.org>
Kynn suggested producing two sets of guidelines. I think this is a bad idea. The likelihood of guidelines being implemented seems to decrease with the number of different documents. It also becomes easier to say "well, we conform the the Authoring Tool Guidelines (content)" and ignore the fact that disabled people cannot use the tools. Since Authoring Tools of some kind are really necessary to be an effective publisher on the web, the failure to make them accessible amounts to the exclusion of disabled people from publishing, merely on account of their disability. (this is what Gregory and Kelly said last week) Splitting the documents does not seem necessary. Those companies who are really trying to make accessible tools, but who have no idea how to do it and are relying on the documents we are producing, will only be able to implement as much as we have written. It seems to me more valuable to have them implement many of the things necessary to help make the content produced accessible and to implement many of the things that make the tool itself accessible than to concentrate solely on the content produced, and force disabled people trying to work with their tools to wait until everyone else has been catered for. (This was essentially my rationale behind rejecting the process proposal that we ignore section 3 until we have section 2 completed. I suspect it was a lot of people's rationale.) Charles --Charles McCathieNevile mailto:charles@w3.org phone: +1 617 258 0992 http://www.w3.org/People/Charles W3C Web Accessibility Initiative http://www.w3.org/WAI MIT/LCS - 545 Technology sq., Cambridge MA, 02139, USA
Received on Monday, 29 March 1999 15:48:20 UTC