- From: Anne Pemberton <apembert@crosslink.net>
- Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 21:58:36 -0500
- To: Scott Luebking <phoenixl@netcom.com>, charles@w3.org, jay@peepo.com, phoenixl@netcom.com
- Cc: nir@nirdagan.com, w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
Scott, That would be true only if the *only* disability that affected web use was blindness. As you know it isn't, and the needs of some sighted folks are for the very features that exclude or annoy the blind user. During the summer there was a lengthy discussion of the needs of one of the largest groups of disabled users, and Jonathan, myself, and others pointed out that text itself is sometimes a barrier, and that text without the visual cues (varied size, bold titles and subtitles, brackets and parentheses, quotation marks, etc.) often render text as difficult to navigate or totally useless to many persons whose disabilities are cognitively based. Although my own cognitive differences are minor, I am a very visual person, and I have difficulty with posts to this list where the words <quote> and <unquote> are inserted in the text. I have to read the post several times to get the meaning. My husband, with significant cognitive differences, would just skip the whole thing as unreadable. Even tho my husband is "visually impaired" due to loss of one eye and ripening cataracts on the other, he is graphically visual rather than textually visual. The guidelines that are supposed to help dyslexic web users do him no good at all. Whether the pages are generated dynamically or statically doesn't change that fact, unless there is something unique about dynamically-generated pages that I am unaware of. If the graphics, multi-media, and visual cues are absent, the meaning isn't conveyed. Anne At 02:50 PM 1/26/2000 -0800, Scott Luebking wrote: >Hi, Anne > >The context in which the statement was made was when a blind person and >a sighted person might need to reference the same dynamically >generated web page. In this situation, it is probably easier for >a sighted person to use a web page designed for a blind user than it >is for a blind person to use a web page designed for a sighted user. > >If they need not be referencing the same dynamically web page, then your >comments are reasonable. > >Scott > > >> Scott, >> A sighted person could use web pages designed for blind user only to the >> same extent that blind persons can use web pages designed for "average" >> users. Blind persons *can* use web pages loaded with graphics and missing >> alt tags as long as there is some text or sound. Likewise, sighted users >> *can* use web pages without graphics and visual formatting. But neither >> user is well served. The blind users can't access the information in the >> graphics, and the sighted users can't access graphics that aren't there. I >> suspect that the blind person who made this statement is mis-informed on >> the prevelence of sighted users who depend on the visual elements as surely >> as blind users depend on their speech synthesizers. A blind user without >> speech equipment would find an all-text presentation as useless as a >> cognitively impaired person would. >> >> Anne >> Anne L. Pemberton >> http://www.pen.k12.va.us/Pav/Academy1 >> http://www.erols.com/stevepem/Homeschooling >> apembert@crosslink.net >> Enabling Support Foundation >> http://www.enabling.org > Anne L. Pemberton http://www.pen.k12.va.us/Pav/Academy1 http://www.erols.com/stevepem/Homeschooling apembert@crosslink.net Enabling Support Foundation http://www.enabling.org
Received on Thursday, 27 January 2000 10:17:40 UTC