- From: William Loughborough <love26@gorge.net>
- Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2000 11:33:53 -0700
- To: "Guidelines" <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
AG:: "First, leave no gratuitous barrier between the information and its consumer." WL: Now that's the level of abstraction that I think we should be pursuing here. Although this "requires" a bunch of explanation, as a guiding *principle* it might be hard to cap. It has nothing to do with not only the Web but with media at all - even language! AG:: "...the intrinsic structure of the information is graph-shaped, not tree-shaped..." WL: The characterization of the structure's shape is of interest but until the fundamental of there being such a thing as "structure" reaches our audience, it mattereth little if we think of ovals and arrows or some other realization. The problem we face is that authors and their tools are besieged by retinal conceit. Too many aren't even aware that the tasks they use their eyes for could readily be made available to machines (and incidentally blind folks) through the use of some not-too-tedious constructs. It just has to be put into what they think of as "English" (or "French" or whatever) so that they "get it". Most of us are totally clueless as to how this is done and often even demean such efforts. I've tried to do it but without much success and it may be that the ability to participate in all these "inner workings" precludes the particular communication skills needed to write in less-polysallabic terms. Al's shot at de-mystifying the thing about "navigable, hierarchical content decomposition." gave us a small taste of how problematic this is because none of the words in that quote (except possibly "content" - which is debatable) are in the daily vocabularies of much of our intended audience. If I try to explain what I do to the people I play poker with (mostly Latino agricultural workers), I bumble horribly. Al Gilman has a similar problem with almost everyone he talks to outside the rarified places he mostly frequents. While I don't expect to pattern-match to the guy who maintains the milking machines, I think we even have a problem with a great many people who design Web sites - and even more so with their managers. -- Love. ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE
Received on Thursday, 7 September 2000 14:32:49 UTC