Re: Outreach

Doyle, (this is eo not gl)

in brief the perceived WAI audience is seen to be government, commerce 
and web specialists, so WAI documents are designed as far as possible 
to suit this perception. There is a somewhat valid argument that as a 
'standards' organisation this is appropriate.

There is at least as valid a case that we need to address the needs of 
individuals* and to ensure that our advice is clear and unambiguous.
Good examples are invaluable, the lack of them continues to make 
differentiation of the purpose of title and alt ambiguous.

I have invited, Alan Firminger to join IG, though EO might potentially 
be a friendlier environment, he expresses interest in WAI and believes 
he has read and understood the guidelines. It is only by inviting 
contributions from members of the public, that we will fully understand 
the usability issues that are slowing our progress with this group.

Are stats available that show the bulk relationship between 
professional and amateur authored pages?
My feeling is that the latter is a far greater proportion ~10:1 perhaps 
or even 100:1, and one can only expect this ratio to increase as time 
passes.
We have perhaps fallen into the trap of believing that all sites are 
documents similar to those we create, and write our guidance for, 
whereas many sites in fact serve very different purposes.

To give a particular example from http://www.peepo.com. We understand 
that the semantic web offers the opportunity to provide plain English 
executive summaries. None-the-less due to a paucity of online 
resources, for some topics we only have links to sites which use 'child 
friendly' illustrations, which some staff and students deem 
inappropriate for our adult users. You can imagine the necessary work; 
for instance in numeracy ludo is a useful game, the only online version 
i have found is in chinese, and has child friendly illustrations.

The use and benefits of alt/title text in general with online games is 
not well evidenced. examples of accessible games could be very helpful.
It is not clear how alt/title text will work with SVG. In a similar way 
to drop down menus, tooltips are invaluable, yet SVG seems not to have 
standardised their usage, and there are undoubtedly reasons for this.

Given that the site in discussion has 80 images and no text or sound, 
it would need a great story teller to maintain interest for a blind 
visitor, the challenge is well worth the effort. Do we even speak of 
story telling at WAI?

Jonathan

*Compare with law which applies to individuals, as well as corporations 
and indeed government, notwithstanding that it is created with legal 
advice, and there is only minimal defence that the defendant did not 
know or understand the offence .



On Thursday, May 22, 2003, at 03:20 PM, saylordj@WellsFargo.COM wrote:

> Hello All,
> Jonathan asked me to post to the W3C guidelines.
>
> Jonathan makes a point (below) that the guidelines are unclear in some 
> ways
> about how to make a site accessible.  There are areas which leave 
> things up
> in the air of course.  In particular defining what it means for 
> someone with
> a cognitive impairment is not well defined.
>
> I wonder though about not putting alt text in for images.  That seems 
> to me
> to be where the guidelines are most clear.  Perhaps Jonathan could 
> comment
> on clarity in more depth.
> Doyle
>
> Doyle Saylor
> Business Systems Consultant
> Intranet Hosting Services
> Wells Fargo Services Corporation
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jonathan Chetwynd [mailto:j.chetwynd@btinternet.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2003 10:16 PM
> To: saylordj@WellsFargo.COM
> Subject: Re: Outreach
>
> Doyle,
>
> Perhaps you could post your comments to the list.
> This person genuinely believes they are following W3C guidelines, and
> over an exchange of a  dozen e-mails has tried to develop the site to
> meet our understanding.
>
> You can tell there is a way to go, and much of this is because of a
> failure of clarity on the part of WAI.
> with regard to scripts, did you read:
> Client-side Scripting Techniques for Web Content Accessibility
> Guidelines 2.0
> http://www.learningdifficulty.org/develop/script-techs.html
>
> Jonathan
>
>
> On Wednesday, May 21, 2003, at 10:52 PM, saylordj@WellsFargo.COM wrote:
>
>> Jonathan,
>> When I went to the website below the images had no alt text, and
>> interestingly when I put the site on my scroll bar it bounced back to
>> the
>> front of the desk top over my other work.  I couldn't stop this
>> behavior
>> which is something I've never seen before.  I had to close that 
>> window.
>> Doyle
>>
>> Doyle Saylor
>> Business Systems Consultant
>> Intranet Hosting Services
>> Wells Fargo Services Corporation
>>
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Jonathan Chetwynd [mailto:j.chetwynd@btinternet.com]
>> Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2003 2:21 PM
>> To: w3c-wai-eo@w3.org
>> Subject: Outreach
>>
>>
>> As some of you will know, it has always been my belief that web
>> accessibility will be working well when individuals rather than
>> organisations are creating accessible web pages.
>>
>> To that end, I'd like to mention one of the best websites that peepo
>> currently links to http://www.magpol.org/s8/0.html
>> (this is a personal view, it's a tough call)
>>
>> The website manager has made changes to the site that don't effect the
>> appearance, but attempt to make it accessible within our current
>> understanding.
>>
>> Jonathan
>>
>> In a way I suppose this is a request for more resources designed for
>> the non-profit sector.
>> We plainly are not meeting this need currently, and this is a
>> significant sector of the whole market.
>>
>

Received on Friday, 23 May 2003 01:18:33 UTC