Re: Cognitive Access Three Types of guidelines or strategies?

One of the main purposes of CSS is to help in the "noble quest" of
maintaining "content" as a separate entity and regarding structure and
presentation as *largely* visualisation tools. The idea is that the
textual content is some lowest level of linguistic abstraction of
whatever it is that is to be communicated. Just putting this content
into words is the semantic level that we so often wrongly think of as
*direct* - almost not abstract, but of course this is not the case,
hence the notion of "clear and simple" that we call for but cannot
really define. All language is "foreign" to that which is to be
expressed as we so clearly realize when we try to talk to other species
or very young members of our own or those who are clueless in our
particular language.

If we are to make much of the Web accessible to (usable by?) people with
differences we must take into account the nature of those differences
and this is not a frequent part of most of our daily experience.
"Cognitive Impairment" attempts to codify something without clear
boundaries. Compared to genius, all others are impaired; compared to
"core vocabulary" (something under 1000 words) all language is too
complex.

Perhaps we can work towards making things clearer with practice in
"translating" stuff into something like Basic English without putting
everything into Pidgin? Perhaps we can...?

-- 
Love.
            ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE
http://dicomp.pair.com

Received on Sunday, 30 April 2000 09:13:01 UTC