My issue

I wish to join the call tonight, only to raise what is still my number
one issue: the perceived priority of guideline 1.

Can this be added to the agenda ?


I think putting the emphasis (the way it's done today: first thing on
the list) on

  -  Ensure that the Authoring Tool is Accessible to Authors with
     Disabilities

is detrimental to Web Accessibility, overall.

Say you're a developer of html editor within a software
company. Either you care about accessibility of the UI, and you
already have a set of guidelines to comply with (from Microsoft or IBM
or Trace) or don't care (but still, you know that kind of guidelines
exist, but you just don't care).  Here comes this new set of W3C AU
guideline.  First thing you see by skimming thru it is that it's just
another set of UI Accessibility guidelines. 

In both cases (you already care or you don't) your reaction is to
ignore/postpone its use because you already have what you need
(something or nothing), and/or it's something you not doing at this
stage of development.

Of course there will be people smart enought to understand the two
aspects, when I see how people get confused by much simpler things
when they first look at novel approaches, I'm _sure_ lots of people
will *never* understand that these guidelines are also (and
principally) about the generated markup, not just the UI: because this
is a novel set of guidelines.

To me this partly negates one of the group's goal which is that these
guidelines get widely used and that Web content gets more accessible
asap.

The other thing is that I personally never used anything but emacs/a
text editor to create Web pages, and this is perfectly accessible, so
it's not like there isn't a viable solution out there.

I would like the AU group to decide whether or not their priority is:
first "deliver accessible content to the Web per WCAG", and then "make
mainstream AU tools itself accessible", or the other way around.

I wish to call a vote wrt this priority on the mailing list.

I'm particularly interested in hearing from the participants in this
group that are going to hand-out these guidelines to mainstream editor
developers internally and ask them to comply.


My proposal is:
  - move guideline number 1 to the end of the list

  - reorder the goals in "1.2 Checkpoint priorities" to be
    1.The authoring tool generates accessible content by default 
    2.The authoring tool is user configurable 
    3.The authoring tool encourages the creation of accessible content 
    4.The authoring tool itself is accessible 

  - edit the intro (I think this is a bug as is) to say "the creation
    of accessible Web content", not just "the creation of Web content"

Received on Wednesday, 25 August 1999 05:28:29 UTC