Re: skill level

I think the skill level stuff is easier to think about in two parts:

In section 1-6, the "author" is assumed to be a person who possesses the
minimum level of markup and application knowledge required to create
markup in the tool BUT not necessarily any knowledge or motivation
regarding the existence or details of accessible document design.

As such, the tool should initially inform the user of accessibility
issues  with an option to suppress most of the help and justification
details later on. However, the tool should never assume that the author
will possess a strong enough motivation to produce accessible content
that they will tolerate lengthy or complex authoring procedures in the
name of accessibility.

In section 7, the "author" is assumed to be a person who possesses the
ability (with appropriate technological assistance) to utilize the OS
interface environment (including applications that follow the
accessibility requirements for that OS environment) AND possesses the
minimum level of markup knowledge required to create markup in the tool.
[ed. note: you can't require application knowledge because they haven't
used the tool yet]

For example, for a text based HTML editor in Windows95, the "author" is
assumed to be capable of operating Windows95 interface objects AND has a
working knowledge of HTML. For a WYSIWYG HTML editor in a X-windows
environment, the "author" is assumed to be capable of operating
X-windows interface objects BUT not necessarily any knowledge of HTML

Jan Richards
ATRC

Received on Wednesday, 1 December 1999 23:16:29 UTC