Priorities and Documentation

The question of priority assignment in matters concerning the documentation 
for Authoring Tools (as well as for User Agents) was unresolvedly discussed 
at yesterday's telecon.

I submit that it is quite permissible for us to, if we so choose, to 
recognize the important difference between the guidelines concerning the 
tools themselves and the documentation one must endure in order to 
install/learn/use said tools. Although for all users these latter 
activities are hoop/hurdle/barrier/nuisance there is a sense in which for 
PWDs the barriers presented completely preclude the ultimate experience of 
the tool proper. Many other users have access to features within the tools 
whose installation will be merely inconvenient but because in many cases 
the mere act of uninformed/misinformed installation can cause cyberfatality 
the inconvenience rises to the level of *DANGER - THIS MAY KILL YOUR 
SYSTEM* because their setup is both rare and fragile.

Further the absence of criteria for reading level considerations also 
precludes access to documentation for a great many people who aren't 
strictly covered as "disabled".

In the light of this I propose: in regard to the documentation for 
Authoring Tools (the UA can do what they want to, of course) we make it a 
priority 1 requirement that access to the documentation demands that these 
documents be Triple-A conformant. If they are not, then that means that the 
tools package itself cannot even be Single-A conformant, which IMO is 
fair/just/proper.

Obviously this cannot be retrofitted into ATAG 1.0, but there may be time 
to debate/resolve/include it in our next version. If it's possible to make 
a version 1.x then I think we should consider it for that.

--
Love.
                 ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE

Received on Wednesday, 15 November 2000 09:51:21 UTC