- From: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>
- Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 17:28:42 -0500 (EST)
- To: Chetz Colwell <c.g.colwell@herts.ac.uk>
- cc: w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
While the results have produced many valuable observations, I am inclined to temper my acceptance of the comments about the organisation and layout of the document with the knowledge that only about one hour was spent reading it. In my view this is too brief a reading for most people. If an author has developed their skills with the assumption that creating an accessible page is simply on of the technical requirements, then a quick look over the checklist will make much of what is contained seem redundant, although I would expect that some of the interim solutions in particular (such as the problems screeen readers have with tables, or the problem that mainstream browsers don't have a sensible model for non-graphic rendering of imagemaps) would be news. If on the other hand they have learned a number of presentational tricks, and managedto use those to create pages which look about right on SomeBrowser 3.4.5 then I suspect they will need to unlearn a fair bit of what they know and relearn it. This is too complex a problem for many people to solve in 3 hours, particularly people without a good understanding of abstract structures. The fact that there are not readily available authoring tools which support accessibility (HotMetal 5, from softquad is currently the best by a significant margin, to my very incomplete knowledge) does not help the situation. (Why only one person from humanities? We're not really techno-illiterates and Luddites - Anglo-Saxon language discussion and (pre-WWW) net-publishing was an established activity when I was introduced to it in 1989...) Charles McCN On Sat, 13 Mar 1999, Chetz Colwell wrote: Hi, This is the first of 8 messages reporting the results of the first stage of our evaluation of the Guidelines with page authors who adapted web pages according to the Guidelines. The second stage is about to begin in which blind people will be asked to evaluate the pages created in the first stage. Below is some background information on the participants and the task they performed. We will start new threads to report our findings regarding the following aspects: navigation, examples, priorities, audience, and other general comments. Background information: >From both observations of participants and participants' opinions, this study has identified several aspects of the Guidelines in which improvements could be made. This first part of the study involved 12 participants who all had experience of creating web pages. They were all university students, except one who was a school pupil. The students were from a range of disciplines: 6 from Computer Science; 3 from Psychology; 1 from Humanities; and 1 from Engineering. The average age was 23 (range of 14 - 35). The participants' experience of creating web pages ranged from a few personal pages to large personal sites, or having been employed to create larger sites for organisations. The number of pages they had previously created ranged from 4 to over 100, with an average of 37. The tasks were distributed as follows: 6 worked with tables-plus-images, 2 with forms, 2 with frames, and 2 with imagemaps. The average time spent on the whole task, including reading the Guidelines in advance, was just over 3 hours. The average time spent reading was just over 1 hour, and the average time spent performing the adaptation task was just under 2 hours. We look forward to hearing your comments on the issues that will be posted in new threads. Regards, Chetz and Helen. ----- Chetz Colwell and Helen Petrie, <c.g.colwell@herts.ac.uk>, <h.l.petrie@herts.ac.uk>. Sensory Disabilities Research Unit, University of Hertfordshire, UK. Tel: +44 1707 284629 Fax: +44 1707 285059 --Charles McCathieNevile mailto:charles@w3.org phone: +1 617 258 0992 http://www.w3.org/People/Charles W3C Web Accessibility Initiative http://www.w3.org/WAI MIT/LCS - 545 Technology sq., Cambridge MA, 02139, USA
Received on Sunday, 14 March 1999 17:28:46 UTC