- From: Al Gilman <asgilman@access.digex.net>
- Date: Sun, 25 Oct 1998 11:38:00 -0500 (EST)
- To: nir.dagan@econ.upf.es
- Cc: w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
What follows is a speech I have given before, but I can see already I will have to give it again, even after this time. The differences involved here are a question of balance and proportion. They are not something we can prove by deductive logic. This tends to generate strong feelings, because we are dealing in judgement above and beyond reasoning. So please excuse me if a little of my strong feelings leak through. I really do want the group to come to a reasonable consensus. 1. Assessment of the situation What has made the WWW phenomenally popular is a trait that it shares with the Microsoft success story: it gets the job done with a minimum intrusion of technicalities. In hypertext, most of the job is done with natural language, with minimal perturbations of added formalism. This is a) what makes the Web great; and b) what makes a purely technical solution to accessibility problems impossible. The determining conditions for effective communication with people with disabilities through the medium of the WWW include both natural-language and document-structure issues shared with all users, and technical factors peculiar to robustness with regard to diverse user interfaces. While the technical factors alone can guarantee failure, only the combination of natural and technical factors can guarantee success. While the technical factors should properly take the lion's share of the page budget in the guidelines document, the story line presented must encompass both natural and technical aspects or we have set up the following failure scenario. We have committed ourselves to a Pyrrhic victory: we can easily declare victory for the document, and lose the war as a result. 2. Failure scenario Step 1: The WAI-GL group decides that the job of the Page Author Guidelines is only to document the technical fixes to the pieces of the problem that have technical fixes. Step 2: The WAI-EO group decides its job is only to educate people to what is in the Page Author Guidelines; and the WAI-AU group decides its job is just to get authoring tools to produce HTML which satisfies what is in the Page Author guidelines. Step 3: The tools and authors observe the technicalities and miss the natural-language side of the issue. Web content is technically flawless, but systematically useless unless browsed without disabilities or adaptive user interfaces. Step 4: The battle to secure effective web communication for people with disabilities moves to lawsuits in the courts. 3. Recommendation for implementation. Page Author Guidelines: Abstract sets the context: the mission is effective communication, the obstacle is user interface diversity, the solution is universal design. This document explains the technical side, but success requires both planning and testing (see para XXX). Further help is on the way as the User Agent and Authoring Tool guidelines gain acceptance. Guidelines dealing with "use the structuring features of HTML" i.e. headers, lists, etc. mention that it is particularly important that these structuring parts be clear and well written. Similarly (as is already done) for link text. EO group: Present the technical provisions of the Page Authoring Guidelines as mechanisms for reaching the broadest possible audience. The legal mandate in the U.S., for example, is for effective communcation. Don't overlook the natural language tools of effective communication when you address the special needs of people with disabilities. The author is better off putting their energies first into the areas that make the web content clearer and more effective for everyone, and second into special features. And, surprise! The user with disability is better off that way, too. AU group: The task is "how can tools help authors compose web content which retains its effectiveness under diverse UI conditions," not "how can tools enforce the technical provisions of the Page Author Guidelines." The tool builder has an opportunity to do more than the Page Author Guidelines have the capability to specify. We should be going for the full potential of the tools. And and we should be capitalizing on the ability of problems encountered by people with disabilities to point out soft spots in our content creation techniques that affect message effectiveness for the general audience.
Received on Sunday, 25 October 1998 11:37:21 UTC