- From: Jason White <jasonw@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au>
- Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1999 19:32:10 +1000 (AEST)
- To: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Further to Charles' suggestion, perhaps we should say: If there is at least one free and widely available user agent that runs under a variety of operating systems and supports language feature X, where X has an accessibility advantage (E.G. style sheet positioning) and should therefore be used instead of old solution Y, where Y has a corresponding disadvantage in terms of accessibility, then authors should cease using Y in favour of X. Exception: this rule can be violated where X does not degrade gracefully when processed by user agents that do not support it. In previous work, this group has applied an analogous test in deciding whether authors should be required (at a priority 1 level) to implement a particular access solution: if there is a widely available multi-platform user agent which makes this accommodation unnecessary, then it need not be made, except perhaps as a priority 2 or 3 item. The criterion formulated above would apply, as one might say, in the reverse direction: if a certain new language feature has been implemented by at least one widely available user agent, and degrades gracefully, then it should be deployed and the kludge or deprecated language feature which it renders obsolete should accordingly be discarded.
Received on Tuesday, 15 June 1999 05:32:17 UTC