- From: William Loughborough <love26@gorge.net>
- Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2000 00:23:04 -0700
- To: Jason White <jasonw@ariel.ucs.unimelb.EDU.AU>, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
JW:: "1. Structure of working group deliverables and their respective audiences. The following documents have been proposed in an effort to satisfy the needs of different communities that are interested in guidelines related to the accessibility of web content" WL: My personal bias is that the original *original* purpose of our output (WCAG 1 & likely 2) was to form a fundamental high-level reference document that could suffer interpretation by, in particular, EOWG and any other bodies including policy-implementors, etc. I think that the current wave of proposed variations on that theme are outside the scope of our charter/purpose. Although, as Gregg said "events have overtaken us", that seems to me a problem for various editors, Web designers, etc. The goal of having all the checkpoints (and for that matter the guidelines) in a database should enable multiple views and search/retrieval methods to be trivially attainable. The job of elucidating these materials has already been well started in the Techniques Document, e.g. the cogent section at http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT-TECHS/#themes serves quite well - its main drawback being the "company it keeps". If you were at the end of 5 miles of noisy copper you would have noticed an annoying delay when you linked to that locale. Further if you looked at the techniques document as a whole you might (if you were one of the people who diss the site) be put off by the irrelevant series of opening screens and the overall hugeness of the thing. It's like having to read the Britannica to find out the major features of Odessa. Rather than plunging into the sorts of things I undertook with http://rdf.pair.com/guide.htm in this group I believe we should continue to have an "ivory tower" aspect to making WCAG 2 and let the EOWG deal with providing portals to it - and perhaps some of the elaboration/elucidation, although as I said above, there is already a body of work in that direction. The more specific language-centric techniques/examples are not at issue. They are clearly our responsibility and are being suitably addressed. I don't think the issue of that sort of material being daunting to those who will use it will arise. But of course a "gun coder" who wants to examine some example language excerpts in a design situation should be quite well able to understand what's there and someone using a hide-behind-the scenes authoring tool must expect the designers of that tool to have absorbed ATAG well enough to remove much burden. -- Love. ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE
Received on Wednesday, 13 September 2000 15:23:11 UTC