Re: New guidelines draft

I think Principle 1 has two aspects, and I have not been able to devise a
formulation which adequately captures both of them:

1. It must be possible to present the content in any one of the visual,
auditory or tactile modalities. This is why we require "textual
equivalents"--because text can be rendered visually, auditorily or
tactually.

2. When the content is rendered, we wish to preserve the modality-specific
components (for instance the auditory and visual tracks of a multimedia
presentation) as the user can work with, while providing equivalents for
the remainder. For instance, if the user requires a completely visual
presentation, we provide captions of auditory material and synchronize
these with the visual track so that the original, visual component is
preserved and rendered alongside the "text equivalent" (in the form of
captions) of the auditory component.

Thus there are two aspects to Principle 1: making it possible to render
the content in any of the three modalities, but substituting only for
those which are unavailable to the user (leaving the others intact).

Proposed reformulations are welcome, as always.

Received on Thursday, 13 July 2000 20:30:47 UTC