RE: Principles

Sorry to interject and otherwise interrupt the thread of this
conversation -- but thanks Bill for bringing a smile to my face today. This
response is a gem! (Sorry Al).

- Mike

> -----Original Message-----
> From: w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org]On
> Behalf Of William Loughborough
> Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2000 2:34 PM
> To: Guidelines
> Subject: Principles
>
>
> 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 15:19:54 UTC