Re: A proposal for changing the guidelines

if we throw out the reference to law and focus on what is implementable and
reachable.  Case in point the Software Engineering Institute's Capabilty
Maturity Model is a metric for how well your company meets their
requirements.  the rating level is zero (chaos) to 5.  Two means you have
some practices in place that can be measured and save rework.

Unfortunately, Level 5 is the Zenith and only a handful of companies after
ten-ish years has reached this.  As a person who has worked in level 2 and
has been instructed to level three, i ask, " Is this what I as a company
want to obtain?"  The cost and burden to reach this is very high and how
does it help my business?  What is the net? Most government contracts
require at least level three - if i participate in this market.  The
overhead to be a level 3 and 5 is very high as your people must be trained
to it and in our job market, workers hop jobs very fast.

There are those who beleive that the level five is an artificial standard
that is not needed to meet business objectives, therefore there is no value
added.

In universal design, there is some leverage with developers that are a part
of a government, but we must also be concerned about developers in
non-government markets.  So it seems there will be more buy-in from one
market segment versus another.  This is not the purpose of WCAG and
universla design but it may be the result.

I think this is the wrong approach.  We need a universal design standard
that is implementable across all developer segments and are supported by
tools.  Then as toolsets and agents meet the other guidelines, then they can
be tightened.

You must provide a guideline that supports rapid application development and
a very fast time to market or else you will not get buy-inform the single
most community you need - developers and managers.


----- Original Message -----
From: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>
To: Gregg Vanderheiden <gv@trace.wisc.edu>
Cc: <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Sent: Monday, March 13, 2000 10:48 AM
Subject: RE: A proposal for changing the guidelines


> I agree that we should think this through. And I think we should conclude
(in
> my humble, but considered opinion) that it is inappropriate for a body
which
> has undertaken the task of finding out what (internationally) are the
> requirements for accessibility of the web to add to the onerous task the
> requirement of fitting in with International law, an area in which most of
us
> are woefully ignorant. Slightly less appropriate, of course, would be to
base
> our work on the law of a couple of countries just because we know it
better.
>
> The education and outreach group has a specific mission to develop
materials
> and raise awareness among policy makers. Perhaps we should be providing
them
> with more feedback if we feel that there are specific areas that need to
be
> looked at differently from a policy perspective than from an accessibility
> perspective. If we know of a particular country that is going to make a
> decision we think is inappropriate, then those of us who are citizens of
that
> country, and the EO group as a representative of W3C, should make
submissions
> to the relevant bodies. But I seriously doubt we know enough about law and
> policy around the world to be able to incorporate it into the priority
scheme
> in a helpful way, especially given the constant change both in it and in
the
> state of the art.
>
> cheers
>
> Charles McCN
>
> On Mon, 13 Mar 2000, Gregg Vanderheiden wrote:
>
>   Some short notes and an important call....
>
>   Short Notes (opinions not rulings)
>
>   4) We should look again at the interaction of our priority guidelines
and
>   regulations.   In the past our priorities have been determined basically
by
>   what makes a page accessible.... Not by its ease of implementation.
If
>   regulations are going to say Priority 1 and 2  -  then we need to think
this
>   through carefully.  I hate to say this but I think we do.
>
>

Received on Monday, 13 March 2000 23:31:50 UTC