RE: consensus?? RE: Textual Images vs. Styled Text

At 01:50 PM 10/16/2000 , Bailey, Bruce wrote:
>(1)  I think the precedent of one arm of the W3C (the WAI) concluding that
>other formal specifications of the W3C (CSS) is "not an appropriate
>technology" is exceedingly dangerous.

How about "not an appropriate replacement currently"?  It's like how
we say that relying upon certain technologies may not be an accessibility
gain either.

For example:  Which produces greater accessibility, longdesc or
d-links?  Well, longdesc is the "right" way, and d-links are "the
way that works".

Dogmatically, longdesc is right.  But in practice, more people can
get at longdesc content if there is a d-link.

This is why it is important to remember that we are dealing with 
_the human element_ and not just hypothetical language specs.  It
may be that CSS is not yet a sufficient replacement!  (In fact, that
_is_ the case.)  Should we bury our heads in the sand and pretend
it is, while knowing that we are hurting accessibility by doing
so?

It's like trying to pretend that since XML and XSLT are W3C
specs, we can therefore rely on browsers being able to use XSLT
and XML natively.  That simply doesn't work, regardless of whether
or not it fits the W3C canon.

>(2)  The original checkpoint references MathML as an appropriate markup.
>Clearly, support by the "big 2" was not one of the original guiding
>principles in the formation of the WCAG.

And, clearly, WCAG 1.0 is seriously flawed in many ways.  Apart
from the red herring of "the big two", are there a number of
assistive technology devices which _do_ understand MathML?

If not -- then the use of MathML is _decreasing accessibility_, not
increasing it.  Regardless of whether or not MathML is a nice,
W3C-approved, XML-based language.

>(4)  To my mind, logo's are quite different than graphical text used in
>image maps and navigation buttons.  I think the guidelines should
>distinguish between the two.

But in what way?  There are definite "needs" for effects which are
only available in graphics which you can't duplicate reliably (or
even at all) in CSS, and branding needs might be as strong for 
navigation buttons as for logos.


-- 
Kynn Bartlett  <kynn@idyllmtn.com>                    http://kynn.com/
Director of Accessibility, Edapta               http://www.edapta.com/
Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain Internet   http://www.idyllmtn.com/
AWARE Center Director                      http://www.awarecenter.org/
Accessibility Roundtable Web Broadcast           http://kynn.com/+on24
What's on my bookshelf?                         http://kynn.com/books/

Received on Monday, 16 October 2000 17:25:16 UTC