usability/accessibility

I believe that one of the things we must do in evaluation tools and
training tools is to take a close look at how we in WAI and the W3C in
general address the issues we confront. It is vital that we "walk the
walk" or "live the life we sing about in our song."

I was struck by the following quotes from Nielsen's remarks about the
"usability of usability methods":

"My claim is that any problems in getting usability results used more in
development are more due to lack of usability of the usability
methods and results than they are caused by evil development managers
who deliberately want to torment their users."

What I gather from this is that we must attend more to the
"accessibility of the accessibility recommendations" rather than staying
focused almost entirely on the recommendations themselves.

In the past when we talk about the "accessibility of tools" we have been
talking about whether they work with screen readers, etc. We must also
examine their accessibility for Web authors in general. Two steps in
this regard are Bobby and Wave, much can be learned from but also
deserve our attention in the sense of how readily they can be used.

The W3C HTML checker (the Geraldizer) seems to me close to an ideal tool
in this regard - enter a URI and get back pretty much what needs fixing.

I realize that the more subjective categories aren't that readily dealt
with by a tool but it still must be kept in mind.

In the case of the various materials that are meant to guide authors in
the production of accessible sites, we should continue efforts to make
it simple so that the argument that this is all too hard not even be
raised.

-- 
Love.
            ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE
http://dicomp.pair.com

Received on Monday, 3 July 2000 11:43:36 UTC