- From: Jon Gunderson <jongund@staff.uiuc.edu>
- Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 10:47:56 -0600
- To: w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
I would just like to commend and congradulate all the members of the working group, and especially the chairs and editors for all their hard work in creating and developing the WWW content guidelines document. I think the draft is very good and will form the basis of helping authors understand how to make their WWW content more accessible. But I do have some comments: 1. It is unclear to me why checkpoints related to adding text information to images was spread across two guidelines (Guideline 1 and Guideline 2). I think it would be much more straight forward to have one guideline related to images and discuss markup for ALT, TITLE, LONGDESC and techniques for images specified in the OBJECT tag. I would also like to see a more complex graph or chart description in the techniques section. Like an example from an on-line newspaper or the dow jones industrial average (or an international stock composite index). I think the long description should provide both the data and the authors intended conclusion or summary of the graph. I would be willing to help with this if the editors request it. 2. Curious to know why "title" is not discussed related to images in Checkpoint 1.1, since it is commomly used by authors with images. While it is referenced for other elements in the guidelines it is not mentioned in the guidelines ot technique document for images. 3. I think guideline 2 could be more specific or be broken up into several more direct guidelines like guidelines 3. My suggestion would be to: A. Put long description of image information into guideline 1. B. Break guideline 2 into two separate guidelines: Provide descriptions of video and animations Provide descriptions of applets and scripts 4. Checkpoint 5.7 I think this checkpoint needs to be priority 1. If you use absolute units in style sheet as soon as you increase font size you get alphabet soup. Or if you leave it priority 2 could you add a reference in the techniques document to have them check their page with style sheets turned off, to make sure the page reads logically. 5. Checkpoint 7.4 How will the summary attribute be used to indicate layout? Is the assumation that if you don't use TH element then the table is for layout? If this is so maybe it should be explictly stated somewhere. 6. Checkpoint 15.8 The term "distinguishing" information is not clear to me. 7. Checkpoint 15.10 I would like to see grouping information as priority . Since it is this type of information that helps people with disabilities and assistive technologies be smarter and therefore more competitive in access WWW pages. Maybe there could be additional types of grouping examples and some standards. Some examples: 1. elements used for advertisement, like on search engine or informational sites 2. elements related to the same product in electronic catolog sites 3. elements related to the same article in an electronic magazine or newspaper, especailly if the articles cross columns or have related images It would probably be difficult to get a standard markup for all the possibiliites. But if user agents had a function that allowed people to read items within the same grouping or ignore items with in the same grouping (like advertisements) it may be a way to improve document navigation and orientation. Jon Gunderson, Ph.D., ATP Coordinator of Assistive Communication and Information Technology Division of Rehabilitation - Education Services University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign 1207 S. Oak Street Champaign, IL 61820 Voice: 217-244-5870 Fax: 217-333-0248 E-mail: jongund@uiuc.edu WWW: http://www.staff.uiuc.edu/~jongund http://www.als.uiuc.edu/InfoTechAccess
Received on Wednesday, 17 March 1999 11:49:28 UTC