Re: remove

Charles McCathieNevile wrote:

> Eric suggested that we include statements about the impact of access
> barriers, and attempt to quantify them in some way.
>
> I am personally not keen on the idea of including elaborate impact
> statements, although there are a number in the guidelines. I am dead
> against the idea of quantifying them, as I feel that is an exercise which
> is certainly beyond the scope, and probably beyond the resources of the
> WG.
>
> How much impact a particular problem has on the general community (as some
> kind of weighted average of impacts on subsections) is, in my opinion
> irrelevant to the goals of the group. It does not assist us to determine
> what guideines should be followed, and what techniques are available, to
> ensure that web content is accessible to all. It may assist people who are
> trying to quantify a cost/benefit analysis, but that is way beyond the
> task we are performing. It is also important in such a situation to have
> accurate, up to date information. A W3C recommendation cannot be changed -
> it is by definition a stable document.
>
> In this context, the removal of priorities on guidelines may be helpful.
> The guidelines themselves must be followed, but it may happen in some
> months that there is no necessity for most people to do anything
> particular to follow a given guideline, since the problem is handled for
> them by an authoring tool (as an abstract example).
>
> The priority definitions are information which may be useful to people
> trying to do a cost/benefit analysis - things which are priority 2
> techniques are not going to provide access in themselves, they are just
> going to significantly improve the quality of that access (by bringing it
> nearer the quality experienced by 'mainstream users' - perhaps we should
> make that more explicit in the P2 definition?) while things which are
> priority 1 deal with the ability to access the information or function in
> any form, without minimal regard to the difficulty of using that
> information or function. (It could be argued that giving a person access
> to a binary representation of the data in a GIF file is providing access,
> but I think most people would agree that it is a stupid argument.)
>
> Cheers
>
> --Charles McCathieNevile
> W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (visiting)
> email: charles@w3.org telephone: +1 (617) 258 8143
> mail: LCS, 545 Technology sq., Cambridge MA, USA
> http://purl.oclc.org/net/charles

Received on Tuesday, 15 December 1998 02:20:02 UTC