Legacy solutions and priorities

There are a number of problems which can, or should, be handled by User
Agents, but which are not.

What priority should we assign to checkpoints which are related to those
problems?

Daniel recently argued for a judgement call that suggested p2 in most
cases. http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-gl/1999JanMar/0006.html

I do not think p2 is sufficient. Where people are using legacy systems,
they will be denied access to the content. This makes the requirement P1
according to our definitions - the group excluded is defined by the
technology they use rather than their specific disability(s). Since
technology changes much more often than people (as a rule the blind do not
learn to see in two years, and see through walls in two more) the question
'how much legacy do we need to provide' should be explicitly answered in
the guidelines, probably in the discussion of scope.

Perhaps we should revisit the idea of time-sensitive guidelines, where
certain guidelines are marked for review of priority at a specific time.
(or the document is). This would involve a change to the process, so I
don't know if it is realistic, but the problem seems to be a real one that
takes time to go away. It may be that some of these time-sensitive
guidelines will become irrelevant before they are widely deployed. But if
we produce a document which says 'do these things and your material will
be accessible', knowing that this will only be true at some point in the
future, then I think we will have fallen short of our mark.

(Although I would like to be convinced that this is not the problem I see
it as being.)

Charles McCathieNevile

Received on Wednesday, 6 January 1999 11:35:12 UTC