Re: A proposal for changing the guidelines

Scott,

The guidelines promote Universal design, rather than targetted design,
precisely in order to avoid the problem of helping one group at the expense
of another. They recognise that there may be situations in which content is
created in a way that is not generally accessible, and provide for that
content to also be provided in a generally accessible format in order to
claim conformance for that content. Note that this is not the same as a
text-only version. For example, there are more people with partial vision
than there are blind people in Australia by several times, and I presume that
this is the case elsewhere. Most of these people find images useful to a
certain extent (if they are properly used, which is a big if) and it is
possible through good design to use graphics in a way which does not have
anegative impact on blind users. Such universal design stretegies serve the
various communities much better than a couple of groups being targetted
(prehaps completely blind and completely deaf) and every other group being
ignored.

The guidelines make no distinction between dynamically and statically
generated content because they describe requirements so that end-users can
access content.

If you can provide us with information about access problems that are not
addressed by the curret guidelines, please do, so we can address them in
revisions. That is why we seek a diverse group of members for the working
group - no one person is likely to know all the problemfaced by all the users
of the web.

Cheers

Charles

On Sun, 12 Mar 2000, Scott Luebking wrote:
[snip]  
  Your statement about a "user impact matrix" is kind of interesting.
  Your argument can also be applied to the guidelines.  Don't the
  guidelines themselves make certain generalizations about particular
  groups.  For example, I can point out a number of areas of access
  problems that the guidelines don't address that cause trouble for users.
  These areas are not generally known because there has been very little
  research based on observation on what kinds of problems blind users can
  run into.  By ignoring the problems, the guidelines are assuming they
  are not issues that affect users very much.

Received on Sunday, 12 March 2000 22:33:39 UTC