Re: Back to Principle 1

Principle 1 is supposed to catch the case to which Al referred, in which
there are no higher-level semantic representations available from which
presentations in different sensory modalities can be derived and
"equivalents" are therefore needed. Perhaps we could reformulate the
principle as follows:

"Ensure that content can be rendered in any of the three sensory
modalities (visual, auditory or tactile)."

This is essentially what Gregg suggested at the meeting. The difficult
aspect is that it applies not just to the whole of the content, but to
parts of it (for instance, if the auditory component of a multimedia
presentation is unavailable, one should provide captions instead of
offering, as the only alternative, a transcript of the entire
presentation, so that users can view the visual component while having
synchronized access to the captions). However, these subtleties can be
explained in the text and it may not, perhaps, be essential that they also
be made clear in the words of the principle itself.

Received on Sunday, 16 July 2000 21:56:54 UTC