Re: Jonathan's Analysis of the WAI Homepage

To take this back to the discussion it came from:

There are people who have various disabilities which make them much more
prone to confusion (short term memory problems, inability to concentrate for
long periods, difficulty understanding things in textual form, and a range of
other functional limitations). For these people, becuase of their disability,
it is significantly more difficult to cope with a site that has poor
information structure. As a direct result of their particular disabilities.

Charles McCN



On Sun, 16 Apr 2000, Kynn Bartlett wrote:

  At 07:40 PM 4/12/2000 , Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
  >An important point to remember is that what is usability for a large group of
  >people may amount to accessibilty for a smaller group. THink of curb-cuts in
  >the physical world...
  
  But it's also to remember that not all usability problems faced by
  people with disabilities are automatically accessibility problems.
  
  For example, the user interface to the HWG's online education program
  is generally pretty poor -- it confuses people (blind and non-blind
  students alike) but when someone who is blind asked me if our
  interface is accessible, I answered, yes, it is -accessible-, because
  it's equally unusable by people with or without disabilities!
  
  So while I agree that there are some areas of overlap between
  "usability for a larger group and accessibility for a smaller group,"
  I caution us to remember that this is not a general rule.
  
  -- 
  Kynn Bartlett  <kynn@idyllmtn.com>                   http://www.kynn.com/
  Director of Accessibility, edapta                  http://www.edapta.com/
  Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain Internet      http://www.idyllmtn.com/
  AWARE Center Director                         http://www.awarecenter.org/
  Next of Kynn: a quasi-regular web log           http://www.kynn.com/next/
  
  

--
Charles McCathieNevile    mailto:charles@w3.org    phone: +61 (0) 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative                      http://www.w3.org/WAI
Location: I-cubed, 110 Victoria Street, Carlton VIC 3053
Postal: GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne 3001,  Australia

Received on Monday, 17 April 2000 13:02:03 UTC