Re: Agenda

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