- From: Kynn Bartlett <kynn-edapta@idyllmtn.com>
- Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2000 06:30:43 -0700
- To: love26@gorge.net (William Loughborough), "Jason White" <jasonw@ariel.ucs.unimelb.EDU.AU>, "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines" <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
At 7:22 PM -0700 9/6/00, William Loughborough wrote: >WL: I think one of the problems we have is that when we write for ourselves >formality and precision are called for; when we write for people who have >trouble understanding the guidelines formality and precision are equated >with opacity and inaccessibility (in the "intellectual" sense). >Although we and more particularly EO threaten to make the materials more >"clear and simple" it is still a pretty speech with no music if you take my >meaning. This is my fear exactly. Well, actually my fear is that we are going out of our way to obfuscate -- I mean, "to make things more complex than they have to be" -- because we _are_ writing for ourselves. And I am very worried as to what we expect the final product to be when we're done. >Our intended audience is not other >members of our choir but people who want to comply, conform, etc. but when >they try to find out how are faced with the language of professors. Well, whenever I _try_ to clarify who "our intended audience" is, I get that we must be all things to all people, I get told that academics are our core readers, I get told that we must be as technical (read: academic and obfuscating as possible), I get told that we're writing "for EO" because they will magically translate the document into understandable English (something which, frankly, has NEVER happened, well, except when I did it on my own), and I get told that the whole question of audience doesn't matter. Gregg's comment at a previous teleconference -- which was "if we don't make something useful, people will use something else" -- still rings in my ears. I think that we need to be careful not to dismiss issues of audience and goals, and I think (from speaking with a number of people at various companies and organizations, most of whom can't -- for political reasons -- state clearly the problems with current guidelines) that our current path may lead us too close to disaster. --Kynn -- -- Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com> http://www.kynn.com/
Received on Thursday, 7 September 2000 09:33:19 UTC