Re: Raggett Guides

On Tue, 1 Sep 1998, Stella O'Brien wrote:

> >From Agenda for WAI EO WG meeting August 27 1998
> Requested comment on sample tutorials
> - Dave Raggett's draft tutorial on HTML http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Guide/
> - and CSS http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Guide/style.html

> I am unclear as to whether the material on accessibility is to be left
> implicit in some areas and made explicit in others. For example - providing
> a distinctive title for a page is useful for everybody  (bookmarks etc.),
> so is there no need to stress the accessibility advantages? Or should they
> be mentioned to reinforce the justification for the overhead of providing a
> meaningful title for every page? To people who are aware of accessibility
> issues, it may seem as if the text is belabouring the point. To people who
> are not aware of the issues it is novel material which would not ordinarily
> have occurred to them.

Thanks for the suggestion.

> I've been working on a sample html document which is annotated for
> accessibility techniques etc. I wondered if it might be useful for the
> reader if the Raggett 10 Minute Guide had something similar which used
> examples from the text? The comments should probably be shorter and the
> language is not plain enough, but I offer the following as an outline of
> what I suggest. For example:
> 
> <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 4.0//EN">
> <html>
> <head>
> <!-- A sample document annotated for accessibility -->
> <title>My first HTML document</title>
> <!-- Title aids navigation because a brief, descriptive page title can
> reflect the name and hierarchy of the web site. Good titles also make it
> easier to recognise pages in a history list or collection of bookmarks. -->
> </head>
> 
> <body>
> 
> <h1>An important heading</h1>
> <!--  Heading levels should only be used to structure a document, and not
> to contrive formatting effects such as font size. Style sheets are a more
> elegant solution for formatting-->

I carried out a spot of user-testing on the html guide and found
that people preferred examples to be more realistic. The guide
currently uses descriptive values to indicate the role of markup,
e.g. 

  <h1>An important heading</h1>

versus

  <h1>The effect of climate on ecological diversity</h1>

I suspect that mixing the commentary text with the example markup
may confuse people. I hope to revise and extend the guide as soon
as I can get some time free. Unfortunately, this may take a while
as things are pretty hectic for me right now.

Regards,

-- Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett
tel/fax: +44 122 578 2984 (or 2521) +44 385 320 444 (gsm mobile)
World Wide Web Consortium (on assignment from HP Labs)

Received on Wednesday, 2 September 1998 03:56:30 UTC