Re: A brief analysis of dynamically generated web pages and

Hi,

In my proposal I'm making the assumption that content can be
presented in different forms in order to achieve accessibility.
Here's the mission statement of the working group:

     "This revised charter extends the duration of the Web Content
     Guidelines Working Group (GL WG) to allow it to complete the Web
     Content Accessibility Guidelines and to do initial
     post-Recommendation analysis of implementation issues and
     appropriate next steps in this area. The Web Content Accessibility
     Guidelines focus on HTML, CSS, and XML, and provide guidance to Web
     content developers on how to make Web sites accessible to users
     with disabilities. This Working Group was originally chartered and
     a Call for Participation issued in October, 1997, and the group is
     within the duration, scope and resources of the WAI Activity
     Proposal and announcement. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
     Working Draft completed Last Call on March 19, 1999."


and the first item in the list of deliverables:

     "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines: A set of guidelines that
     clearly outlines the major principles for creating accessible Web
     content, and includes verifiable checkpoints for each guideline."

I might be missing something, but I don't quite see any reference
to only a single format of content being required for all disabilities.


Is there a reason why selection of the format has to be via detection?
If detection were available, the better design would be for the
server to take a guess via detection, but allow for the user to over-ride
any way.


The guidelines actually do make decisions already about what is
appropriate for individual groups of users, e.g. use of tables,
labeling each form component, etc.


If software can generate web pages which are optimal in accessibility
efficiency for a each particular user while conveying the all the
information, is there an advantage to the user to cause him/her
to use a form of the content which is less in terms of accessibility
efficiency?  My assumption is that in most cases people will
much more frequently benefit from greater accessibility efficiency
than having the same presentation of their colleagues.

In the few cases/applications where it is important to see the same
exact presentation of content, the web server could create only one form
of web page to be used by both sighted and blind users.  (Though, a
question to ask is given the nature of blindess, how similar will be the
perception of the presentation for blind people as for sighted people
any way?)


Scott



> Nir has correctly identified the basic problem of automatically providing
> different versions - this problem is exactly the same as faced by mobile
> devices which have an extremely diverse range of capabilities. The W3C work
> on CC/PP is intended to address precisely this question, and hopefull in the
> near future it will be possible to describe user requirements, preferences
> and capabilities in terms of media much better, and serve content tailored
> for that. An example from the mobile world is to serve just the outline of a
> page (perhaps the top couple of header levels, and summaries of multimedia
> objects) and to serve a single section on request.
> 
> The other problem that has been identified by Gregory and others is the
> question of what is appropriate for individual groups of users. For example,
> some people who have no vision are not interested in receiving images, and
> don't care about the colour of text. Others have software which allows them
> to distinguish classes of text in tones, or to render graphics in a tactile
> or sonic format, or need to know how the content is being presented to their
> colleagues, in order to talk about the same things. As I understand the
> goal of this group, it is to produce guidelines which enable people to create
> content once that can be used by people regardless of disability, rather than
> ot create multiple forms of content for each different set of user
> needs. That approach is necesasry in the case where it isn't possible to
> create generally accessible content, and may sometimes be an optimisation for
> reasons of implementation.
> 
> Charles McCN

Received on Saturday, 20 November 1999 19:57:16 UTC