Re: Important?

At 03:32 PM 8/10/2000 -0700, William Loughborough wrote:
>I am very leery of leaving the decision about importance entirely up to
>the author. When Gregg spoke of an author claiming that something didn't
>merit serious text equivalent materials (because it was "just eye candy"
>and not intended to provide significant semantics but only be for the
>attractiveness offered blindless people) it rang the kind of bell I hear
>in other accessibility cases: "we don't need an elevator, I've never
>seen anybody in a wheel chair on the second floor."

I agree, it is important to know what is being missed. However, it would be 
nice to be able to point out these artistic visual effects so that users 
who want to concentrate on the actual content can do it more easily. With 
equivalent elements it is easy to use class or other semantic definitions 
for these, with equivalent attributes it is a bit more difficult. We also 
need to define some agreed vocabulary for these definitions so that user 
agents can provide means for users to skip equivalents when so wished.

Marja

>A (perhaps specious) argument is that readers who can't see the eye
>candy might still have an important use for knowledge about it because
>they are Web designers or students of Web design.
>
>Even if 50 blind folks said they didn't care about this stuff, we must
>remember that such opinions are less significant than they seem because:
>1) they don't know what they're missing; 2) there's a lot of "fashion"
>in what's *important*.
>
>--
>Love.
>             ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE
>http://dicomp.pair.com

Received on Friday, 11 August 2000 03:52:28 UTC